Zusammenfassung der Ressource
Godden and Baddeley
- Aim
- To investigate whether a natural environment can act as a cue for recall
- Procedure
- 18 participants from a university diving club
- Learn a list of 38 unrelated two or three syllable wordds underwater or
on dry land and then recall them either underwater or on dry land
- Radnomly allocated 1 of 4 conditions
- Context-cued
- Learn and recall on dry land
- Learn and recall under water
- No context cue
- Learn underwater, recall on dry land
- Learn on dry land, recall underwater
- Took place in an open water site in Oban, Scotland
- 2 participants dropped and replaced for technical reasons
- Conducted over 4 days
- Each diver experienced each condition after a 24 hour delay, following
a scheduled dive to ensure all participants were cold and wet
- All fully kitted in diving gear
- Underwwater wore breathing and comunication devices
- On land, breathing apperatus removed
- Tested 2 at a time
- Submerged up to 20 feet underwater and played a tape recording of the word list
- Words presented in blocks of three, with a four second interval between blocks
- Each list presented twuce, and after a four minute delay, the
participants had to write the words, in any order, in two minutes
- All participants used a pencil to write down the words on a weighted clipboard sealed with plastic
- Results
- Recall was around 50% higher when it took place in the same environment as learning
- Mean
- Learn and recall on dry land
- 13.5
- Learn and recall under water
- 11.4
- Learn underwater recall dry land
- 8.4
- Learn dry land recall underwater
- 8.6
- Conclusion
- Environment can act as a contextual cue for recall
- Evaluation
- Strengths
- Realistic, open water environment
- Greater generalisability to real-life situations than lab research
- As participants were tested in pairs, it's unlikely they would have cheated
- Weaknesses
- Lack of control
- Equipment failure
- Inconsistent diving location
- Lack of standardisation
- Timing
- Fitness
- Weather/dive conditions
- Noise levels
- Cheating is still a possibility as researchers were not present
- No change of environment couldve allowed adittional rehearsal
- Change of environment could have experienced interference in memory
- Later experiment
- No difference due to interference task
- Practical applications
- Reinstate learning context for examinations
- Taking witnesses back to the scene of the event