7. Support for Baddeley’s model comes from the dual task paradigm. During a study with this paradigm, subjects were given two tasks. The first task was to remember a list of digits (from two to eight). The second task involved a reasoning skill. In this task, they would be shown something such as “AB” and be given relevant true/false statements such as “A precedes B” or “B is not preceded by A.” Then, they’d be ask to recall the memory items. The results were that the more digits they were asked to recall, the slower the time was for the reasoning task. When both tasks were very easy, there was no performance decrement. When the digit load was greater, the digit span task was therefore more difficult, they… Joel loves to interview people.

1. The serial position represents behavioral evidence for how information is stored in long-term memory. The curve is the plotted proportion of correct memory items recalled over their serial position in the original list. The curve is typically U-shaped with slightly higher recall at the recency end than the primacy end. The argument for the higher recall proportion at the recency end is STM; because of the rehearsal buffer (or what Baddeley would later call the phonological loop), as there are more and more items added to the list, more items toward the beginning of the list drop out of short-term memory. Subjects are allowed to rehearse in this paradigm, and the recency effect is due to smaller retention interval for those items in STM. The argument for the primacy effect is LTM; items at the beginning of the list are rehearsed more often – the more often subjects rehearse something, the more likely the item is to be recalled in LTM. The items in the middle have a low proportion of recall mainly because of rehearsal; they’re being kicked out of STM as new words are added and they have been rehearsed fewer times than those that have been encoded into LTM.