The Effects Of Related Words On The Short Term Verbal Memory Of Psychology Students

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.

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

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 hypothesis that in Experiment 1, words at the beginning and end of a list would be better remembered while in Experiment 2, words at the beginning would be better remembered, was partially rejected, while still being partially true. The hypothesis that a delay would in fact make a difference was supported. In both tests, words in the first third seemed to be remembered by significantly more of the participants. However despite the predictions, words in the last third of experiment 1 seemed to be not significantly more than words in the middle third. experiment2 did seem to fit with the hypothesis, as the words at the start seemed to be higher than the rest, but there was a absurdity on word 16, “ocean,” which was recalled 7 out of the 9 times. Apart from this, experiment 2 seemed to support the hypothesis.

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.

Allport, Postman (1947) and Loftus (1974) also support Bartlett’s idea of reconstructive memory. Loftus mainly focused on the reliability of eyewitness testimonies. As done in this experiment, Loftus and Palmer conducted a study on the effects of wording a question differently and how that would affect the answer. In the experiment the researchers used two different verbs on two different test groups. One was “contact” the other was “smashed”. The effect of this was a change in the speed estimated by the participants. The verb “contact” gave an average speed of 32mph while the verb “smash” gave an average of 41 mph in the experiment conducted by Loftus. There is a positive correlation between word use and how memory is retrieved because of it.

Multiple studies have been conducted that investigate false memory in humans focusing on word recall, processing and retention interval, and auditory imaging. Roediger and McDermott (1995) suggest that individuals who participated in their study are more likely to recall the critical words and lures if the list of words presented were closely associated to them. Critical lures are the tendency to recall words that are associated with presented information (Kreiner, Price, Gross, Appleby, 2004). Roediger and McDermott (1995) also suggest that the same individuals will be more familiar with the critical lures compared to the words actually presented (Roediger, McDermott 1995), while other studies suggest similar conclusions. This paper will discuss the effect of false memory with word association, the ability to retain the words, and auditory learning and testing with research done by Roediger, McDermott, Gallo, Pilotti, Jacoby, and Thapar.

The primary aim of Experiment 5 was to test whether participants are spending more time searching memory for A-Br relative to C-D pairs. If the cues for the A-Br pairs seemed more familiar to participants, this could encourage them to search memory longer for the pair relative to C-D pairs. It is reasonable to assume that they would be more familiar given that the individual items in A-Br pairs tend to be better recognized relative to C-D pairs (Aue et al., 2012; Criss & Shiffrin, 2005). In memory models such as REM (Diller, Nobel, & Shiffrin, 2001) the time spent searching memory is represented as an index of the number of times the model attempts to retrieve information from memory and either fails or rejects the retrieved information. Thus, each additional attempt at searching memory affords an additional opportunity to retrieve either the correct memory trace, retrieve an incorrect memory trace, or to fail to retrieve the memory. As such, having an additional opportunity to retrieve something from memory could boost the likelihood of retrieving either the correct or incorrect trace for A-Br pairs relative to C-D pairs and could potentially explain both the PF and PI observed in the current data.

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

The purpose of this experiment was to replicate the study of Loftus and Palmer regarding the effect of language on memory. The aim of the study was to examine whether schemas interfere with information processing and if misleading questions about an event can change an individual’s memory concerning that event. In the experiment, the independent variable was the verb that differed in the two conditions (smashed or contacted), and the dependent variable was the participants’ speed estimation when asked to recall the video of two cars crashing

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

The working model of memory was developed by Baddeley and Hitch in 1974. It suggests that short term memory is made up of different stores.

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.

In this experiment we replicated a study done by Bransford and Johnson (1972). They conducted research on memory using schemas. All human beings possess categorical rules or scripts that they use to interpret the world. New information is processed according to how it fits into these rules, called schemas. Bransford and Johnson did research on memory for text passages that had been well comprehended or poorly comprehended. Their major finding was that memory was superior for passages that were made easy to comprehend. For our experiment we used two different groups of students. We gave them different titles and read them a passage with the intentions of finding out how many ideas they were able to recall. Since our first

IV) Jalbert, Neath, Surprenant (2011), suggested that past demonstrations of the word length effect, the finding that words with fewer syllables are recalled better than words with more syllables.