Coding,Capacity and Duration

What is coding?

the format in which information is stored in various memory stores

What is the research into coding?

once information gets into the memory system, it is stored in different formats depending on the memory store. The process of converting from one group to another is coding

Describe Alan Baddeley’s research

gave different words to four groups of ppts to remember:

• group 1 - acoustically similar

• group 2 - acoustically dissimilar

• group 3 - semantically similar

• group 4 - semantically dissimilar

shown original words, asked to recall in correct order.

immediately struggled with acoustically similar after 20 minutes, struggles with semantically similar

What is capacity?

the amount of information that can be held in memory store

Describe Jacobs research into capacity STM only

digit span- how much STM can hold at any one time

researcher gives 4 digits then ppts are asked to recall these in correct order out loud, if this is correct the researcher reads out 5 digits and so on until the participant cannot recall correctly, this determines digit span.

he found that the mean was 9.3 and for letters was 7.3

What did Miller say about chunking

he noted that things come in 7s, suggest span of STM is 7± 2

people can recall 5 words and 5 letters

they do this by chunking - grouping

Describe research into duration of STM

Peterson and Peterson tested 24 undergrad students, each took part in 8 trials, student were given a constatant syllable to remember and a three digit number. student was asked to count backwards to prevent mental rehearsal. on each trial they were told to stop after a different amount of time 3,6,9 and so on.

This is called retention interval and suggests STM has short duration

Describe research into duration of LTM

Harry Batrick and colleagues, studied 392 ppts from ohio aged between 17-74

high school year books were obtained and recall was tested

photo recognition, so photos and free recall where they recall names of graduating class

ppts tested within 15 years of graduation were about 90% accurate in photo recognition. After 48 years, recall declined to 70%. Free recall was worse. after 15 years this was 60% and dropped