Murdock

Aim

To provide evidence to support the multi store explanation of memory

Method

The participants involved in the study had to learn a list of words which were presented one at a time for two seconds per word and they then had to recalls the words in any order.

Results

The words at the end of the list were recalled first (recency effect) and the words from the beginning of the list were recalled well (primary effect). The words in the middle were not recalled very well.

Conclusion (1)

Murdock had concluded that this study provided evidence for separate short-term and long-term stores.

Conclusion (2)

The recency effect provides evidence that the last few words were still in the short-term store and the primary effect provides evidence that the first few words flowed into the long term store

Lacks internal validity

This is because of extraneous variables at play during the study, e.g. They may be tired and this would effect the dependant variable meaning the results would not be accurate.

Lacks ecological validity

This is because having to memorise a list of words is not something that we would do everyday so it does not really relate to the real world and because of this the findings may both be unreliable or unuseful.

Low demand characteristics

This is because it would be hard to guess the aim of the study and because of this the participants would act naturally during the experiment meaning we could get accurate results.