Coding, capacity and duration of short and long term memory
KEY TERM DEFINITION EVIDENCE EVALUATION
The format in which memory is stored Baddelly (1966): A limitation is that Baddeley did not use
Coding Participants were given a word list to meaningful information. Because the word
remember with four different lists had no relevance to the participants, they
groups: acoustically similar, may have coded the stimuli differently to how
acoustically dissimilar, semantically they would lay down memory in the real life.
similar, semantically dissimilar. This means it is difficult to generalise.
When asked to recall words
immediately (STM), there was more
confusion with acoustically similar
words. When there was a delay of 20
minutes (LTM) there was more
confusion with the semantically
similar words
The amount of information that can be Miller (1956): A limitation of Miller’s research is that it has
Capacity stored in the memory Found evidence to suggest that the been criticized by Cowan (2001) who found
STM has a very limited capactity of that the upper limit of items recalled was four.
about 5-9 items. He stated that This implies that Miller may have
people can increase the number of overestimated the capacity of memory and it
items they can store by chunking e.g. may be lower.
MRSCARFITDOGCANBAR.
Very short duration (maximum is roughly Peterson & Peterson (1959): A limitation of Peterson and Peterson (1959) is
Duration of 18 seconds) Participants remembered lists of the use of trigrams as memory stimulus. This
trigrams, then count backwards. means that the study lacks external validity as
STM They found that the longer the gap behaviour observed in the experiment may
between exposure and recall the not be typical of behaviour in a natural
poorer the recall, suggesting that context. This limits the extent to which this is
duration of STM no more than 18 useful in the investigation of memory
seconds duration.
Long duration (can be a lifetime) Bahrick et al (1975): A limitation it is harder to control extraneous
Duration of Used a sample of 392 participants variables. Eg. some participants may have
aged between 17 and 74. They were looked at their yearbook photos several times
LTM given a recall test based on their over the years, which may have acted as a
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