| Strength of the Peterson and Peterson study? | Controlled experiment, the participants had practice trials so they understood the instructions, ppts confusion did not interfere with the measure of the DV. |
| What were they trying to find? | The duration of short-term memory to provide empirical evidence for the multi-store model |
| Sample for the study? | 24 psychology undergrad students |
| What did the green and red light from the black box mean? | Green - the trail was ready to begin
Red - stop counting and recall the trigram |
| What was the trigram at the beginning of each trial? | A trigram followed by a number which the participant had to count backwards from in 3's or 4's |
| Why did the ppt's have to count backwards from the trigram? | To minimise rehearsal between the presentation and recall. |
| How many times were the participants tested and which intervals? | 8 times
3,6,8,12,15 and 18 seconds after the red light. |
| How much could the participant recall with the 3 seconds interference interval? | Over 50% of the trigrams accurately |
| How much did the amount drop from 15 seconds onwards ? | Dropped to less than 10% from 15 seconds onwards |
| What does this study tell us about short term memory? | Decays rapidly from short-term memory, accurate recall of the trigrams decreasing rapidly over the duration of 18 seconds. |
| How do you stop the short-term memory limited duration? | Rehearsal |
| Weakness of the Peterson and Peterson study? | Only 24 students, the sample is not representative, they could be better or worse at memory tasks than other ppl. |
| Weakness of the Peterson and Peterson study? | Not a realistic memory task, not applicable to explain duration of the STM in a real life settings. |
| Strength of the Peterson and Peterson study? | Standardised instructions, explain how the 'black box' worked, so the experiment can be replicated consistently |
| Strength of the Peterson and Peterson study? | Controlled experiment, the participants had practice trials so they understood the instructions, ppts confusion did not interfere with the measure of the DV. |
