Godden and Baddeley (1975) Psychology Essay

Godden and Baddeley (1975) Godden and Baddeley under took a field experiment in which they investigated if being in the same environment when learning/remembering something affects their recall in appose to being in a different environment from where the words are learnt. They did using an independent group design. Godden and Baddeley found 18 deep-sea divers whom were given 38 unrelated two or three syllable words, they all had the same time to try and remember these words. They were then randomly allocated to 4 conditions, one being to learn and recall the words on the beach, the second being to learn and recall the words underwater, the third being learn on the beach and recall underwater and the last being learn under water and recall on the beach. The mean number of results recalled for dry land learning and recall were 13.5, the mean number of results recalled for underwater learning and recall was 11.4, the mean number of results recalled for under water learning and dry land recall was 8.4 and the mean number of results recalled for dry land learning and under water recall was 8.6. The results of this experiment resulted in proving that when learning something in a certain environment, that when recalling/being tested on in that same environment, the results will be better than recalling in a different environment. Godden and Baddeley’s experiment had many strengths, one being that the experiment had ecological validity, meaning the experiment can be generalised to real-life situations, another being that order effects are limited, as the participants are less likely to suffer boredom as they were each assigned 1 condition therefore the validity of the test is not affected, a final strength being that Godden and Baddeley randomly allocated the divers to their conditions making the experiment unbiased. With much strength, the experiment had a few limitations, these being that the participant variables may have affected the experiment as some divers may generally be more intelligent or have good memory, therefore their results would be better than most in either environment, also, when divers were travelling to a different environment from which they learnt their words, they may have been distracted causing them to forget. Finally, the results cannot be applied to the whole population, only divers as the test was specifically done on divers, and not average people.