Psychological Research Report on Memory Essay

Memory is divided into three categories. These categories consist of: sensory memory, short term memory and long term memory, out of these short term memory is the main focus in this essay. It has been widely researched due to interest of how much memory can be stored, how long this memory can be stored for and what information is memorised.

Memory is a set of cognitive processes that allow us to remember past information (retrospective memory) and future obligations (prospective memory) so we can navigate our lives. The strength of our memory can be influenced by the connections we make through different cognitive faculties as well as by the amount of time we spend devoting to learning specific material across different points in time. New memories are created every time we remember specific event, which results in retrospective memories changing over time. Memory recall can be affected retrospectively such as seeing increased recall in the presence of contextual cues or false recall of information following leading questions. Memory also includes the process

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.

Research has shown that there is “greater activation in the left inferior frontal and medial temporal lobes” (Stanford, 2006, p. 208) during the encoding of words which were later remembered as compared to those which were forgotten. The sensations perceived by sensory nerves are decoded in the hippocampus of the brain into a single experience (Mastin, 2010). The hippocampus analyses new information and compares and asssociates it with previously stored memory (Mastin, 2010). Human memory is associative in that new information can be remembered better if it can be associated to previously acquired, firmly consolidated information (Mastin, 2010). The various pieces of information are then stored in different parts of the brain (Mastin, 2010). Though the exact method by which this information is later identified and recalled has yet to be discovered, it is understood that ultra-short term sensory memory is converted into short term memory which can then later be consolidated into long term memory (Mastin, 2010).

When the research participant in Test C1 focused on the way the words look, she recalled a lesser number of words compared to Test C2. The result was consistent with the researcher participant`s performance. In Test C2, the research participant used the model of the semantic network to connect the words by imagining that she is on the balcony eating a cookie and typing a story written by her about a farmer that found a treasure an alligator attacked him, so he killed it by a fork. Whereas in Test C1, she tried to combining the words in common groups to remember it. As a conclusion, the more meaningful the word is; the deeper the level of processing it is, and the easier to recall

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

The purpose of this experiment is to demonstrate that people can forget what they have just previously remembered. People are more likely to recall a stimulus correctly if the context is the same as previously presented; people are more likely to forget if the context is different. Participants were St. Francis Xavier University undergraduate students in Cognitive Psychology. There were three different phases of the experiment; Phase I: a series of 44 word-pairs was presented. Participants read the words silently; Phase II (cued-recall): a cue-recall test was imposed. Participants were to recall a word that matched the cue presented; Phase III (memory judgment): a cue and parget-pair were displayed. Participants were to remember whether they had recalled the target previously in Phase II. It was found that there is a statistically highly significant difference between conditions “same” and “different”, F(1,46) = 139.7, p < .001, indicating that our memories are often contingent upon context.

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

The working memory aids our ability to remember words over non-words, specifically the phonological loop and visuospatial sketchpad (Baddeley, Hitch, 1994). Other studies by (Paivio, 1991) have shown that concrete words are easier to recall than abstract words due to semantic associations. The purpose of this paper is to explore the parts of memory that help certain words to be more easily remembered than others.

“We remember what we understand; we understand only what we pay attention to; we pay attention to what we want,” is a famous memory quote stated by an actor, Edward Bolles. Memory is a broad term that reflects different processing abilities on how humans encode, store and retrieves information. There are numerous domains in the human’s memory ability with the storage and retrieval of short-term and long-term information. For many centuries, theorist has tested recall and recognition capabilities on the human’s memory functions. Memory retention is our ability to retain experiences based on the mental process, through the organization of information through meaning, where relations between new information is associated with the previously stored

Literature review 450 Words Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin were the first two to reveal how the human memory works in 1982, and they design the multi store model. According to them both information is stream through the memory system then separated into a set of stages for the information to be stored. The three stages of process for the memory are sensory memory, short-term memory and long-term memory. Each stage of the process, there are limitations in the terms of capacity, duration and encoding.

Prior to the early 1970s the prominent idea of how memories were formed and retrieved revolved around the idea of processing memory into specific stores (Francis & Neath, 2014). These memory stores were identified as sensory memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory. In contrast to this idea, two researchers named Fergus Craik and Robert Lockhart proposed an idea linking the type of encoding to retrieval (Goldstein, 2015). This idea is known as the levels of processing theory. According to this theory, memory depends on the depth of processing that a given item is received by an individual (Goldstein, 2015). Craik and Lockhart stressed four points in supporting their theory. First, they argued that memory was the result of a series of analyses, each level of the series forming a deeper level of processing than the preceding level (Francis & Neath, 2014). The shallow levels of processing were believed to hold less importance and are defined as giving little attention to meaning of an item. Examples of which include focusing on how a word sounds or memorizing a phone number by repeating it over and over again (Francis & Neath, 2014) (Goldstein, 2015). The deeper levels processing involve paying close attention to the meaning of an item and relating that meaning to something else, an example of which would be focusing on the meaning of a word rather than just how the word sounds (Francis & Neath, 2014) (Goldstein, 2015). The second point Craik and Lockhart

The generation effect was developed as a part of memory research, and it states that individuals tend to recall words that they personally generated better than words participants were given. Since this phenomenon has been an important part in many studies yet seemed to have no true solid

This experiment proposes to study the effects of memory improvement by reciting and saying the words out loud to oneself. Participants will be assigned to either two different types of conditions and will then be required to recall the information of words as best as they can. It is assumed that a higher level of generating the targeted words into memory is improved when readers say the words out loud to themselves. Thus, the hypothesis concluded is that people who say words out loud after reading them are expected to improve their memory in retaining information.

Godden & Baddeley (1975) provided evidence for this by asking participants to learn a list of words either on land or 15 ft underwater. They were better able to recall words if asked to do so in the setting in which they originally learnt them. 2. Secondly, State-Dependent Retrieval suggests that recall is improved if the individual is in the same physical and/or psychological state as when they first learnt the information. Godwin (1969) investigated the effect of alcohol on recall and found individuals were better able to recall information learnt when drunk if they were drunk.