Characteristics of STM and LTM and studies

What is coding?

When we take in new information to remember, we must process it from the senses

What is duration?

How long memories are stored for

What is capacity?

How much a memory store can hold

Visual coding

Stored as visual image

Acoustic Coding

Stored through sounds

Semantic coding

Stored through meaning

What is acoustically similar and dissimilar?

Similar: they sound the same - hat,cat,bat

Dissimilar: sound different - hat, stage, ball

Semantically similar and dissimilar

Similar - they have the same meaning - big, large

Dissimilar- have different meanings - gate, big

Explain Baddeleys study in STM. And which store does it mainly encode

Aim - was to investigate whether the STM codes info semantically or acoustically

4 groups of ppts were given different lists and were asked to recall them

• STM mainly encodes things acoustically

Explain Baddeleys study in LTM. And what store

Involved a delayed recall study

• presented lists of 10 words and would ask ppts to recall words after 20 mins in order

• Ppts would struggle with semantically similar (words that sound the same)

• LTM mainly encodes semantically

What is capacity?

The maximum amount of information that can be held

Explain Jacob’s study for capacity of STM

• He gave ppt a list of digits they had to recall out loud if they got it correct another would be added until they get it wrong.

• Average span was 9.3 and letters decreased to 7.3

Explain Millers study into capacity of STM and an example

He said that we can hold 7 items in STM 7±/- 2

• he believed stm stored chunks of information rather than numbers or letters by themself

• Examples: mobile phone numbers

What is thought of long term memory’s capacity?

It is assumed to have an unlimited capacity - but is difficult to do experiments as it may not always be remembered in complete detail.

What does duration mean?

The amount of time information can be held in memory

Peterson and Peterson’s study of STM

Three random letters were shown ( no meaning) after hearing or seeing the Triagram the ppt had to count backwards in 3’s

• ppts only remembered about 90% when there was a 3 second gap

• Recall only dropped 2% when there was an 18 second gap

• this shows duration is limited from 15-30 seconds

Explain Bahricks study into LTM

Ppts between 17-74 were asked to recall people they went to school with

Photo recognition- they were showed a picture with 50 students they went to school with and would have to try and remember their name from their face

• within 15 years of graduation 90% were accurate, within 48 years this dropped to 70%

Free - recall: some ppts were asked to try and name students just from their memory

• within 15 years 60% accurate, 48 years it was 30% accurate