Henry Roediger Experiment

Delayed free recall experiments consists of subjects being given a rundown with words or images following the test of remembering the most words possible afterwards. In the middle of these two stages, there is a short postponement or interlude, which contrarily impacts the measure of words that can be recalled. (11)

ABSTRACT: The purpose of this experiment was to test whether a delay before recall would affect the serial position effect. The experiment was done by getting participants to take part in a simple tests; hearing words read out, then after they are read out, recalling them and writing them down. Two of these tests took place, one without a gap before recall, and one with. The results only partly supported previous research, with both tests showing a higher number of people remembering words at the start of the list, but unlike previous research findings, the last words of the list were not remembered

This experiment is based on previous research done. For example, in 1969, in a research by Bower and Clark, no difference in the immediate recall scores of both groups was noted, but when later asked to recall, those who used narrative chaining recalled an average of 93% of the words compared to the control group which only recalled an average of 13% of words. In another experiment, participants who used narrative chaining remembered six times more information than participants who learned by simply repeating the words to themselves (Loftus, 1980). Narrative chaining is particularly useful when a person wants to remember information in a particular order. The aim of the study is to investigate the effectiveness of narrative chaining on memory. It is hypothesized that in a group of 59 participants aged 10-69 years old, participants who use narrative chaining to remember a list of words will remember a higher number and percentage of words when asked to write down as many words as possible through serial recall compared to participants who use maintenance rehearsal.

The current study was created to retest reproducibility of Slamecka and Graf results about participants remembering words better when they generated the words than when they read the words in a sample of undergraduate students at Texas A&M University (Slamecka and Graf, 1978). Nineteen undergraduate students at Texas A&M University participated in an experiment where one group was given a set of words and were told to memorize the words. The other group was given one word and the first letter of the second word and was told to generate the second word. It was hypothesized that the group with the participants who generated the second word would remember those sets of words better than the other group. Results showed that the group who generated the second word significantly memorized the words better, the p value being < .05. More in depth explanations involving more variables are discussed such as the five rules, or the within subjects, and their effect on the generation effect as well as future directions.

Roenker, D., Thompson, C., & Brown, S. (1971). Comparison of measures for the estimation of clustering in free recall. Psychological Bulletin, 76, 45-48.

In the last half century several theories have emerged with regard to the best model for human memory. In each of these models there was a specific way to help people recall words and

During the study Murdock asked participants to learn a set of 20 words. Afterwards they were asked to recall them without the aid of any visual cues. The results supported the serial position effect as shown below:

An individual’s ability to use have the clearest more accurate memory has always been one of heated debate. False memories from the same constructive process that produces true memories exposing a very concerning fault in our reasoning of memory. This idea of false memory is text in this experiment by using a sequence of 16 words, along with both unrelated and related distractor words. The 43 participant, who is an ungraduated at Hope College enrolled in PSYCH 340, is shown a list of 16 words and asked to recall them. Some of the recalled words were from the original list and some of the others were unrelated or related distractors. It was hypothesized that the related distractor words would be more likely be reported than the unrelated distractor

• Condition 1 – 25 participants were given a printed grid of 30 random words and given 2 minutes to memorise them. Participants were seated at a table/desk in a quiet room. After learning there is then a 2 minute pause after which participants were given a further 2 minutes in which to recall the words.

On the same line, Miller’s “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on our Capacity for Processing Information” (1956) investigated the limited amount of information that can be held in short-term memory and found that it can hold about seven items (plus or minus two) at a time, however, by organizing information into a sequence of chunks, people are able to “stretch” the amount one can retain in short-term memory. This suggests that specific mnemonics may enhance recall. Furthermore, this supports the idea of subjective organization improving recall by Tulving because participants performed better when using

Memory retrieval is likely to be good when information that has to be remembered has already been tested before multiple times. In fact, practicing retrieval has a larger effect than actually revising this information (Hockley, 2009).

Memories are known as episodic memories. these memories can be information that is being stored or images that are being stored depending of when, where and what is being retrieved. There is a brain structure called the hippocampus that creates the memories that manages the memories into the structures. In order to create the memories the hippocampus connected to the region of the cerebral cortex through several regions that receive the sensory information. The memory records those experiences into the brain they can be short term or long term memories. All types of memories can be based on the connections within the neural circuits of each memory system. The weakness or strength of the memory usually depends on how the memory was formulated.

Besides this, prior research has also demonstrated that serial recall is dependent on age. When performing free recall tasks, young adults tend to begin recall with items appearing at the end of the lists (Howard & Kahana, 1999). In the immediate serial recall tasks (ISR), performance on ISR is characterized by extended primacy effects and small recency effects (Tan, 2008). Serial position effect is expected to generalize

|  Episodic memory is recollection of specific events;  Semantic memory is the recollection of general knowledge and facts.

Declarative memory is further divided into semantic memory and episodic memory. Semantic memory is an acquired meaning of structured record of facts, meanings, concepts and knowledge about the external world whereas episodic memory is memories of experiences and specific events in time that are often autobiographical and have emotions associated with them.