PSYC13016: According to Baddeley (1990) the phonological loop was theorized to account for the finding that information in short-term memory: Cognitive Psychology Assignment, CQU, Australia

The Research

According to Baddeley (1990) the phonological loop was theorized to account for the finding that information in short-term memory is coded phonologically. For example, when seeing a list of words, mistakes in recall are often based on the sounds of the words (i.e the phonological structure). If Baddeley is correct then it should be harder to recall letters that rhyme than letters that do not rhyme. This research activity examines this question using memory recall of sequences of letters.

Basic Method

The grid below shows ten sequences of eight letters. In each sequence four of the letters are phonologically similar and four of the letters are phonologically dissimilar. You should present each sequence in turn to your participant and ask them to recall that sequence.

For example, you should present the first sequence to your participant, then remove the sequence and ask the participant to recall the sequence as accurately as possible. If the test items are q w e r t y u i, then the participant should aim to write down q w e r t y u i. If the participant can’t remember a letter they should leave that space blank.

Then present the next sequence and again ask the participant to recall the sequence as accurately as possible, and so on until you have presented all ten sequences to the participant. You should have sixteen completed grids for sixteen participants.

Prediction

Baddeley’s (1966) theory of phonological encoding predicts that you should have a greater number of errors for letters that rhyme than for letters that do not rhyme, even though you have not verbalised the letters during learning.

In this example more errors were made on trials with rhyming words than on trials with non-rhyming words.

If you don’t get the data that you were expecting don’t panic. Lots of experiments don’t work in science and sometimes the reasons why they don’t work can provide important insights. At the very least we can learn about how to do the method better next time.