The Effectiveness of Narrative Chaining on Memory Essay

One supporting study of reconstructive memory is Bartlett’s War of the Ghosts study in 1932. Bartlett found that after telling participants a story, participants remembered the main plot of the story by changed unfamiliar elements to make sense and help remember the story by using terms more familiar to their own cultural expression. Bartlett found that Participants shortened the story as retellings went on. After 6-7 retells the story was shortened from 330 words to 180. This supports reconstructive memory as it provides evidence of the idea that we have a ‘notepad’ where we store the most important information of a memory and fill in the gaps using schemas that relate to our cultural background.

Narrative chaining is an effective method for a number of reasons. The first is that once information is received through your sensory memory in order for it to be processed into short term it needs to be paid attention to. For it then to be transferred into your long term memory so it can be recalled after a longer duration of time, it needs to be repeated. Narrative chaining calls for both attention and repetition to occur, as the subject must pay attention to the material to form a story and they must repeat to reduced the likelihood of it being forgotten.

Messages become shorter when passed from one person to the next. Memories can be modified to fit one’s personal social experiences (i.e., conventionalization). Memory is unreliable, sensory stimuli are not stored as is but are actively transformed by the brain for storage depending on individual factors such as personal relevance and expectations. The most essential information is better remembered, but what is considered “most essential” may depend on an individual’s experiences. This suggests memory does not function as a video recording, but is a highly complex process that is influenced by an individual’s levels of attention, motivation, expectations, experiences, emotional state, etc. It also suggests that memory is an active process that involves constructing narratives out of events rather than passively recording

They were 67 participants in study 1 and they were students from the Princeton University subject pool, there was an equal amount of men and women in the study and 1 unknown. Also, 2 of the participants were excluded from the study, 1 because he was already exposed to the experiment material and the other

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.

The results show that there is a difference in the words being recalled in the imagery method and in the words being recalled in the rote rehearsal method. The data showed that there was a greater amount of words recalled by imagery than there was in rote rehearsal. Rote rehearsal had a mean value of 8.28, which wasn’t that close to imagery. Imagery had a mean value of 12.96. The median and mode for rote rehearsal had a value of 8, and both the median and mode for imagery had a value of 13. It wasn’t until the standard deviation that rote rehearsal increased higher than imagery. Rote rehearsal had a standard deviation of 5.11, while imagery had a standard deviation of 4.67.

Yamashiro et al. (2014) measured RR (convergent remembering), NN (convergent forgetting), and DM (discrepant memory) as functions of degree of separation and these were measured from what the participants mentioned in their journals. The RR convergence had both individuals remembering and retelling the story. The NN convergence had both individuals forgetting the story. The DM convergence had one individual knowing the story while the other did not. The first week there was no significance between direct, indirect, and unconnected pairs within the RR, NN, and DM groups. Directly connected pairs are individuals that had conversations at any point of the trial. Indirectly connected pairs were the individuals that greater than one connection at any point of the trial. Unconnected pairs are those who did not interact at all. The DM is more likely to occur comparted to NN and RR in week two. This study suggests that conversational influences effect collective remembering more and is widely spread across social networks than collective forgetting. Individuals having conversations about a story triggers the memory of the other individual and allows them to have a share view of the past. This study also examined direct connect verse indirect, and Yamashiro et al. (2014) results show that both direct and indirect connects are effect by mnemonic convergence (RR, NN, and DM). An

Cognitive psychology deals with the mental aspects of processes such as memory where there are many methods, known as mnemonics, which attributes to the expansion of information that can be retained by a person. One method used is chunking, the practices of taking chunks of separate information and organizing them into larger units so that information becomes easier to recall, which is demonstrated in Tulving’s “Subjective Organization in Free Recall of ‘Unrelated’ Words” (1962). Tulving (1962) aim to measure the extent of recall on verbal items when presented in different orders. Tulving asked sixteen female undergraduates to learn a list of 16 words that would be presented on sixteen separate trials, each trial had the words in a different

Psychologists and neuroscientists have acknowledged the different kinds of memory such as short-term, long-term and the working memory and the way they work, how they are rehearsed and disrupted. One word can be easily affected when being processed to the long term memory do to the short term retention. The psychologists and neuroscientists hypothesized that the participants would maintain specific things in their memory in articulatory rehearsal and that way they could report them just by focusing and paying more attention to those specific things. What the main purpose of this study was

Participants were tested in... All participant responses were audio-recorded using a RECORDER name. The recordings were conducted by the primary investigator. Participants completed both narratives in one sitting on the same day. Each participant was asked to complete two narrative production tasks: a pictorial narrative and a personal narrative. In order to counterbalance any effect of order, the order of the two tasks were alternated between the participants with every other participant completing the picture description task first.

This experiment was a replication of Tulving and Pearlstone’s (1961) study, investigating the effect of cued and non-cued recall on memory retrieval. It was hypothesised that participants will recall more words from the stimulus when using cued recall, compared to free recall. The experiment was conducted in a laboratory setting and used an independent measures design, using sixteen participants, aged 14-16 years from an academic high school by means of opportunity sampling. Participants were split into two conditions of equal size. In the first condition, participants were read aloud the stimulus (24 words from 6 categories) and then told to recall the words onto a test paper. In the second condition, participants were read aloud the same

We looked at the various ways of learning and research already existing on them. One method that has repeatedly been touted as the best way to learn is called Spaced Repetition. This topic has been researched heavily and could be utilised in our study. Spaced repetition is a learning technique that incorporates increasing intervals of time between subsequent review of previously learned material in order to exploit the psychological spacing effect. Alternative names include spaced rehearsal, expanding rehearsal, graduated intervals, repetition spacing, repetition scheduling, spaced retrieval and expanded retrieval["Human Memory: Theory and Practice", Alan D. Baddeley, 1997]. In simple terms, imagine you start learning something new on day 1,

Given the right cues and prompts, young children can remember a lot of information, but not as much as adults because they are not as expert in most areas. However, having growing knowledge is a likely source of memory improvement. The fuzzy trace theory says that young children tend to encode, store, and retrieve specific details of information, while elementary school children encode, store, and retrieve the main idea of information. A child’s memory span is the capacity of his or her short term memory. To determine a child’s memory span, he or she hears a short list of stimuli, such as numbers, at a fast pace and then has to recite as many of those numbers back as possible. The speed of the information processing is important, specifically the speed at which memory items can be identified. The speed of repetition is another powerful predictor of memory span. There are several strategies that children can use to help their long-term memory. One strategy is organization, and is mostly used by older children. An example of organization would being able to recall the days of the week in chronological order very quickly, but not alphabetically. Another strategy is elaboration. Elementary students are less likely to use elaboration than adolescents, but can be taught how to use it on a certain learning task. Elaboration is an extensive processing of information, and includes thinking of examples and making personal connections. Imagery is another memory strategy, and is most helpful to older elementary students. When using imagery, children create mental images of verbal information. Teachers can also use strategies for helping their students remember information. These include: repeat with variation on the instructional information, link early and often, and embed memory relevant

Psychologists have always been interested in the population’s memories and what causes individual differences in the genders. The focus of this experiment is on one variable, gender. Who is better at remembering what their significant other just said? Who would be better at remembering the events that led up to a car accident? According to George Miller, “The typical storage capacity for short-term memory is seven plus or minus two items.” (82) This theory giving the assumptions there are a certain number of spaces for information to be held. His hypothesis is not debatable because it lacks a measure of a chunk. According to Baddeley et al, “Words represent one commonly accepted type of item and in this case, the chunking hypothesis would predict that the capacity of short-term memory should be consistent regardless of the size or duration of the

It is vital to draw a distinction between those with hyperthymesia and those with other forms of outstanding memory, who typically use mnemonic or comparable rehearsal strategies to memorize long strings of independent data. Memories recalled by hyperthymestic individuals are inclined to be personal, autobiographical accounts of both significant and ordinary events in their lives. This extensive and highly uncommon memory does not derive from the use of mnemonic strategies, evidenced by the fact that