Human Memory
Lesson 4
Human Memory Models Factors Affecting Encoding in STM Produced by
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Factors Affecting Encoding in STM The sound of words: • Conrad’s study suggests that short-term memory relies heavily on acoustic coding. • Other researchers like Baddeley (1966) believed that the type of stimulus to be remembered might affect the way it is encoded.
• Baddeley believed that Conrad’s results were dependent on the fact that he used consonants as his stimulus material. Consonants after all had to be similar in sound than in any other characteristic such as visual or meaning. • Baddeley set about testing this idea by presenting participants with words opposed to consonants. • By doing this he was testing for acoustic similarity with similarity of meaning (semantic similarity).
• Participants were presented with a sequence of 5 short words that were acoustically similar (e.g. man, mad, mat, map, can, cat, cap). • He noted how well they were recalled compared to a list of acoustically dissimilar words (e.g. pen, day, few, sup, cow, pit, bar, hot) and to a list of semantically similar words (e.g. big, large, wide, high, great, tall, long, broad). • Baddeley found that words with similar sounds or (acoustically similar) were much harder to recall than words which did not sound alike.
• Similarity of meaning (semantically similar) had only a slight detrimental effect on performance. • Baddeley’s finding therefore supports Conrad’s findings and concluded that short term memory relies on the sound of words opposed to meaning of words. • Baddeley later found that sound similarity disappeared when he tested participants for LTM. • This suggests that the main factor for encoding depends on whether items are being stored in STM or LTM.