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Psychology - coding, capacity and duration - AO3 Cheat Sheet (DRAFT) by

Memory - Coding capacity and duration - AO3

This is a draft cheat sheet. It is a work in progress and is not finished yet.

CODING / CAPACITY / DURATION

A weakness of coding / capacity / duration is that the research uses artificial stimuli.
For example in Peterson and Peterson’s research pts were given a consonant syllable and asked to count back in threes from a three digit number.
This matters because this task is not reflective of everyday tasks so we should be cautious about genera­lising the finishing to real life tasks
Therefore the study lacks mundane realism.

DURATION

a weakness of Bahrick’s research is that there may have been uncont­rolled extraneous variables
for example in one of Bahrick’s conditions pts had to do a photo face recogn­ition task. Pts were shown 50 photos some of which were people that were in their graduating class that they had to identify.
This matters because partic­ipants got signif­icantly high accuracy percentage of recogn­ition of class mates ( 90% for those who had graduated in the past 15 years and 70% for pts who had graduated at least 40 years ago ). Some of the partic­ipants may regularly look at the graduation yearbook while some partic­ipants may have never look at it. Those who have looked at the yearbook recently old have rehearsed the memory
therefore the experiment had uncont­rolled extraneous variables and is therefore invalid as the researcher isn’t measuring what they intended to measure.
 

CAPACITY

A weakness of millers research is that he may have overes­timated the capacity of the STM
For example Cowan for that the capacity of the STM is four chunks.
This matters because, miller suggested that the capacity of the STM is seven items which is different and the lower estimate made by miller of 5 is closer.
Therefore, miller didn’t accurately suggest the capacity of the STM and the reliab­ility is lowered as other resear­chers achieved other results.

Coding

A weakness of research into coding is that STM may not only be coded acoust­ically
for example, Bandimote et al. Found that partic­ipants used visual coding in STM. If partic­ipants were given a visual task (recalling a picture) and prevented from doing any verbal rehearsal - they had to say Lalala - before a visual recall task they were able to succes­sfully recall the picture.
This matters because, normally we ‘trans­late’ visual images into verbal codes in STM but because verbal rehearsal was prevented then partic­ipants had to use visual codes.
therefore the findings of Baddeleys research lacks validity as Baddeley did not accurately look at how we encode inform­ation because coding is not just verbally acoustic in the STM as Baddeley suggested.