To make participants rely on their short-term memory by using visual intakes/coding of six from the consonants B, C, F, M, N, P, S, T, V and X, because the rate was to fast for the participants to keep them they had to rely on their memory.

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Encoding in short term memory – Conrad (1964)

Aim: 

To make participants rely on their short-term memory by using visual intakes/coding of six from the consonants B, C, F, M, N, P, S, T, V and X, because the rate was to fast for the participants to keep them they had to rely on their memory.  

Procedure:

participants were shown random sequences of six letters taken from the consonants B, C, F, M, N, P, S, T, V and X. Six letters were shown in rapid succession in a screen and participants were required to write them down as they appeared.

Findings:

Errors were noted and rate of presentation was too fast for the participants to keep up so they had to rely on memory. Conrad found that the significant majority involved the substitution of a similar sounding letter for example ‘b’ for ‘v’ and ‘s’ for ‘x’. In a similar study he found that participants found it hard to recall a string of acoustically similar letters.

 

Conclusions:

He concluded that’s such acoustic confusion provided evidence for acoustic coding in STM.

Criticisms: 

  • On the negative side, he only used six certain constants he may of found more out if he had used a lager group of letters.
  • Also people in real life often learn lists like this so it would be new to their memory not an everyday thing they usually use.

Capacity in short term memory – Jacobs (1887)

Aim:

To investigate how much information can be held in a short-term memory.

Procedure:

A laboratory experiment using digit span technique was conducted. Participants were presented with a sequence of letters of digits. which they were required to serial recall. The pace of the presentation was controlled to half seconds. Initially the sequence was three times, which then increased by a single item until the participant consistently failed to reproduce the sequence correctly. This was repeated over the number of trials to establish the participants’ digital span. The sequence length was recalled correctly on at least 50% of the trails was taken to be the participants STM span.

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Findings:

Found that the average STM span was between 5 and 9 items. Digits were recalled better than letters. STM span increased with age.

Conclusions: 

Findings show that STM has a limited storage of between 5 and 9 items. The capacity of STM is not determined by the nature of the information to be learned but the size of the STM span, which is fairly constant across individuals. STM span increased with age which maybe due to increasing brain capacity or improved memory techniques.  

Criticisms:

  • The research lack mundane realism as the ...

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