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Henry Roediger Experiment

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Abstract This is a replication of Henry Roediger and Robert Crowder’s experiment. The aim of this study is to look at the effect of serial position on the ability to recall information. The design used was random sampling and included an opportunity sample of participants at Lee's Summit West High School. The participants were asked to recall the names of presidents and then list them in order of how they recalled them and then in order of presidency. The results show that participants were able to recall more names correctly using free recall. Introduction How memories are stored in the brain can be categorised into two main groups, semantic memories and episodic memories. Episodic memories are autobiographical memories of personal events, and semantic memories are common …show more content…

Roediger and Robert. G. Crowder. The purpose of Roediger and Crowder’s experiment was to study serial recall in semantic memories in comparison to episodic memories. The researchers conducted their study on two groups of students from Yale and Purdue totaling 159 participants. In the free recall group, subjects had five minutes to write the names of as many presidents as they could. In the second group, subjects were given five minutes to recall the names of as many presidents as possible, but they were asked to list them in order of term in office. The two groups did not have a substantial difference in their results. The free recall subjects recalled 23.7 and free position recall recalled 23.4, and the groups had similar bow shapes in their graphs. It strongly supported the hypothesis that endpoints of a series are most commonly recalled by the brain and the point at which the other memories are remembered from. The aim of the current replication of Roediger and Crowders study is to investigate whether free recall or free position recall result in an increase in one's ability to recall the

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