Multi-store Model
Semantic Coding in Long-term Memory
Baddeley's Experiment (1966)
His aim was to find which type of encoding is preferred by LTM and STM.
Showed participants a list of 10 similar or dissimilar words.
A. Acoustically Similar words (man, map, can, cap)
B. Acoustically Dissimilar words (try, fan, hut, pen)
C. Semantically similar words (clean, neat, tidy)
D. Semantically dissimilar words (round, active, purple)
Semantics-
The category of language that deals with the meanings behind words.
Results
After a timed delay, he asked the participants to recall each list of words.
Baddeley found that recalling semantically similar words was more difficult (55% accuracy) than recalling semantically dissimilar words (85% accuracy).
Explanation
The confusion between semantically similar words shows that the brain holds memory based on semantics. The idea is that the shared semantics get stored as one idea rather than seperate ones, and so specific words are lost and just the shared semantic meaning remains.
If the brain didn't store things semantically, the results would be the same whether the words were semantically similar or not.
Evaluation
Low Ecological Validity- Recalling lists of words is not an everyday task and so the results cannot be generalised. The experiment also took place in a lab.
There are more forms of coding than just acoustic and semantic
People can keep songs in their LTM based on sound, regardless of semantics.