The Lexical Decision Task Shows Evidence Towards Readiness

Memory is one of the most important things we have in our life because it involves in almost every part of our mind including problem solving, decision making, and our interest in life. We depend on it because it helps us make good decisions in life. Memory is the solution in learning and thinking and we use it in our everyday life. Think about the first time you kissed someone you loved or the time you learned how to tie your shoe for the first time. Those are all forms of memory whether they are short or long term. If you do not remember anything from the past then you are having a hard time managing your memory. Without memory you would be exposed to new and extraordinary things in life. Take for example, “Aliens, Love where are they?” by John Hodgman and “Jon” by George Saunders. John Hodgman and Jon both teach readers how without memories we would have a difficult time knowing who we are, who we love, and what we want in life.

Outline and evaluate research in to the duration, capacity and encoding information in short term memory.

Memory provides a sense of personal identity. Memories that were made from the past create the person that they have become today. It helps to ground judgments and with reasoning. As an illustration, one day a young girl was shopping at the mall with a group of friends and they deiced to steal a cute

Atkinson’s and Shiffrin’s (1968) multi-store model was extremely successful in terms of the amount of research it generated. However, as a result of this research, it became apparent that there were a number of problems with their ideas concerning the characteristics of short-term memory. Building on this research, Baddeley and Hitch (1974) developed an alternative model of short-term memory which they called working memory. Baddeley and Hitch (1974) argued that the picture of short-term memory (STM) provided by the Multi-Store Model is far too simple. According to the Multi-Store Model, STM holds limited amounts of information for short periods of time with relatively little processing. It is

Memories influence more than just the past. Their many roles affect the present and future in many different ways. Memories determine how you act and how you feel in the different circumstances of your life. Memory’s variety of uses makes it very significant in lives of every human being.

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.

A human’s memory system is just one of many amazing things that demonstrate the brain’s complexity. Without memory we would have no recollection of anything, ever. Within our memory system there are three main measures that assess how much information is retained, these are known as recall, recognition and relearning. These are all measures of retention, that influence how much information is encoded, stored and retrieved within one’s memory system. Each measure of retention has a different level of sensitivity. The more sensitive a measure of retention, the easier it is to retain information.

Memory is a very elusive subject matter. Humans have tried to understand what memory is and how it works since the beginning of time. Without it, humans would not be the highest functioning members of the animal kingdom. It enables humans to accomplish the most complex tasks.

Short term memory (STM) is the second process in the ever so popular Information Processing Model and it is the area where information is the most readily available, but also most susceptible to being forgotten (Baddeley, 1986). STM has a very limited capacity, and can usually only hold so much information, the magic formula for this being “7 +/- 2” (Insert source). The formula of plus or minus two, simply stated is that humans STM’s can only store five to nine items of information at a time. Research has also shown that there is trace decay theory for items being STM, where items are easily forgotten within seconds if they are not put through the articulatory loop (Baddeley, 1986). As described by Baddeley, the articulatory loop is rehearsal of items that are currently stored in the STM. If items are not mentally rehearsed, then they are lost. Baddeley was the first to coin the term articulatory loop, but most researchers use it interchangeably with the term phonological loop. The phonological loop is specific to rehearsing verbal information in order to

Gardener, Watson and Craik hypothesized that there would be a positive correlation between remembering key words and the amount of time spent thinking about those key words. The dependent variable or manipulated variable was the amount of time given between word lists, in hopes that, as the lists were read faster, the subjects would have less time to think about the word with the critical letter and thus their short term memory could be tested as they were asked to recall their word. Long term memory was also tested at the end of the study as subjects were randomly asked to recite any word they remembered from all of the lists they heard. The data that was recorded on the chart of results were the i value, or rate of presentation, and percent recall of critical

In 1962, Murdock preformed a simple free recall experiment, similar to Condition One of this study. He found that words in the middle of a list had been subject to displacement, in the sense that they had been stored too long to be put into short-term memory (STM), but not long enough to be stored into long-term memory (LTM). When primacy and recency effects are present, it is thought that information is recalled from both STM and LTM. In 1966, Glanzer and Cunditz preformed a very similar experiment, but added a distractor task. What they found was that the words at the end of the list are only remembered if recalled first and tested immediately, which delayed recall, eliminating the recency effect. If this explanation is correct, then we could anticipate our results for experiment one to feature both evidence of primacy and recency effects, while with conditions two and three, we can expect no recency effect. The data supported the hypothesis for the first and second conditions, however, did not for condition three because there was evidence of a recency

In the study of cognition, memory is essential. When studying types of memory, short term memory is essential to look at separately from other forms of memory. Short term memory is defined as being able to retain small amounts of information for approximately 30 seconds unless the person uses rehearsal (Goldstein 2011). Rehearsal is used to describe when someone constantly repeats information to remember it for a certain period of time. One of the questions in the field of cognitive psychology is how much can short term memory hold. Baddeley (1975) published an experiment that tested how much short term memory will hold. One researcher, Miller, had suggested that the “magic number” is seven. However, Baddeley chose to focus on how

A study was conducted to test how short term memory is retrieved and transferred to long term memory, the Serial Exhaustive theory was presented by Saul Sternberg. For the experiment, the participants were shown a series of numbers and was instructed to memorize them. Following, the probe number was presented on the screen. The participant was then prompted to indicate whether or not the probe number was included in the sequence shown initially or is it was new, the amount of time it took for the participant to respond was measured. The dependent variable is the measurement of the reaction time and the independent variables were set size (1, 3, 5) and whether or not the probe was present or absent. It was hypothesized that the participants will search for all of the items regardless of where the target appears. It was also hypothesized that first sequence of numbers will have the quickest reaction time part the participants, followed by set three which will be faster than set five.

Memory in general is defined as the process that involves in retaining or storing information and retrieving or remembering the information without the presence of the original stimuli. Memory is broken down into two compartments a short term memory and a long term memory. Short term memory holds information for a brief period of time, while long term memory tends to hold information for a longer periods of time. Association memory is the capacity to learn and retrieve information between two distinct stimuli and associate them with one another. Therefore, the association memory is primarily the base of this experiment.

Memory makes us. It is, to an extent, a collection of unique and personal experiences that we, as individuals, have amassed over our lifetime. It is what connects us to our past and what shapes our present and the future. If we are unable remember the what, when, where, and who of our everyday lives, our level of functioning would be greatly impacted. Memory is defined as or recognized as the “sum or total of what we remember.” Memory provides us the ability to learn and adjust to or from prior experiences. In addition, memory or our ability to remember plays an integral role in the building and sustaining of relationships. Additionally, memory is also a process; it is how we internalize and store our external environment and experiences. It entails the capacity to remember past experiences, and the process of recalling previous experiences, information, impressions, habits and skills to awareness. It is the storage of materials learned and/or retained from our experiences. This fact is demonstrated by the modification, adjustment and/or adaptation of structure or behavior. Furthermore, we as individuals, envision thoughts and ideas of the present through short-term memory, or in our working memory, we warehouse past experiences and learned values in long-term memory, also referred to as episodic or semantic memory. Most importantly, memory is malleable and it is intimately linked to our sense of identity and where we believe we belong in the world.