Abstract
The tip-of-the-tongue (or TOT) phenomenon is the inability to retrieve a specific word, while typically knowing quite a lot of information about it. In recent years, experimental psychologists interested in human memory have studied the TOT phenomenon in the hope of better understanding why this mental process is interrupted as well as any useful techniques for overcoming it. This paper describes two sets of experiments held at separate American universities. The first set of experiments investigates which phonological components are capable of facilitating word retrieval. The second assesses how often a group of subjects could retrieve rare target words on the basis of their definition alone, while simultaneously comparing semantic and phonological cues for the target words.
The Tip of the Tongue Phenomenon:
A Momentary Inability to Retrieve Words Stored in Our Memory
The tip-of-the-tongue (or TOT) is an experience involving difficulty retrieving a specific word or name, while knowing that it is stored in your memory. Individuals experiencing the TOT phenomenon tend to recall one or more features of the target word, such as the number of syllables it is comprised of, or its initial sound and letter. People in this state report feelings of anguish and frustration when searching for the word, and a sense of relief when the word is finally found. For example, in conversation or in writing you might have had the experience of trying, but failing to
Low levels of processing include operations like counting the letters in words and higher levels of processing might include forming semantic relationships such as understanding what the words’ meaning is. According to Craig and Lockhart who formulated this theory memory recall would improve as the information is processed in greater depth. However it has been hard to define exactly what depth is and it has been found that there are other factors that make people remember things. (Zachmeister, E.B., Nyberg 1982)
* Tip- of-the-tongue phenomenon- when you know certain information but have difficulty being able to recall it.
There is reliable and dependable proof for first-letter access, there is only weak confirmation for syllable access. In both experiments, syllable figures did not contrast across confidence levels and a higher coincidence at confidence levels in the research. (Brown and Burrows, 2013). A Mnemonic is utilized to recollect, and it could be a phrase, a short song, or something easily recalled, and it can assist the individual in finding something that is difficult to remember. For instance, we may use a phrase like PEMDAS, which means, Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally". It stands for "Parentheses, Exponents, Multiplication and Division, and Addition and Subtraction".
The results of Roediger and McDermott’s experiment were very significant. The participants recalled the critical distractor words 40% of the time compared to 14% recall of the normal distractor words. When they
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.
Phonological and semantic lists can cause high, strong rates of false memories. Phonological false memories would peat in shorter durations of a presentation, but semantic false memory rates would start to increase with more spread out presentation times. It is also theorized that the semantic and phonological lists are similar with spreading activation, but the processing could differ when it was the speed and depth. Semantic false memory requires deeper conceptual processing for the semantic false memory to activate. Shallow perceptual activation of phonological lures decay faster than semantic activation. When other factors are constant for false recall rates, the rates for phonological and semantic lists are similar. The False recognition rates for phonological lists are lower than semantic lists by twenty to thirty percent.
He conditioned a dog to make it drool at the ring of a bell. Normally
Further supportive evidence comes from priming studies; priming refers to the improved capacity for detecting or processing a novel or familiar stimuli based on recent experience (Tulving & Schater, 1990). In a famous study by Heist et al. (1991) amnesic patients and control subjects studied words and non-words. They were then given a perceptual identification test with briefly presented previously studied and unstudied items. Perceptual priming was measured as the increase in the probability of identifying the former versus the letter items. Amnesic patients exhibited entirely normal priming for both old words and non-words. On the other hand, they showed significant impairment in recognizing items that had appeared on the administered test. Priming of non-words did not appear to be based on the activation of words that were phonologically or orthographically similar to the non-words. The non-word results suggest that priming can involve the acquisition of new information, rather than simply the activation of pre-existing representations. Researchers concluded that intact perceptual priming in amnesic patients reflects specific changes
Human memory is flexible and prone to suggestion. “Human memory, while remarkable in many ways, does not operate like a video camera”
Using paired wordlists of nouns, Bower and Gordon demonstrated this in their 1970 experiment. In their study, they had undergraduate students learn paired wordlists by one of four methods – rehearsal of the two words; reading a sentence in which one of the words acted upon the other (i.e. “The boy hit the ball.”); creating a sentence which linked the two words (i.e. “Nancy threw her bag on the table.”) or creating a mental image of the two words together (i.e. imagining a basket of flowers) (Bower & Gordon, 1970). Results found that students who employed imagery did better on recalling the word pairs in comparison to other methods and those who utilized rehearsal had the lowest recall rate out of the four groups (Bower & Gordon, 1970).
Further evidence for the existence of the phonological loop comes from Conrads and Hulls (1975 in Passer, 2009) experiment in which they examined the effect of phonological similarity. They found that serial recall in a list of similar sounding words tended to yield poorer results with participants finding it difficult to remember compared to words that sounded different. It has also been found that recall in semantically similar words tended to have little or no effect, supporting the idea that verbal information is transferred in a phonological manner in working memory. In addition, Vallar and Papagno (1995 in Smith, 2007) found that the phonological store in brain damaged patients were dysfunctional.
Word recognition involves an individual’s ability to identify words independently without requiring related words for contextual help. A widely examined topic in the field of cognitive psychology, it deals with understanding printed letters as a word which has been kept in the lexicon. The word frequency effect is important in the recognition of words. It suggests more common words in printed language are easier, faster and more accurate to distinguish than words that appear less frequently. Outlined in their journal article, Howes and Solomon utilized Thorndike-Lorge’s word count for word frequency and measured the threshold of recognition. They found correlation coefficients of -.68 to -.75 between word frequency and threshold or duration.
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
We are replicating J.R. Stroop’s original experiment The Stroop Effect (Stroop, 1935). The aim of the study was to understand how automatic processing interferes with attempts to attend to sensory information. The independent variable of our experiment was the three conditions, the congruent words, the incongruent words, and the colored squares, and the dependent variable was the time that it took participants to state the ink color of the list of words in each condition. We used repeated measures for the experiment in order to avoid influence of extraneous variables. The participants were 16-17 years of age from Garland High School. The participants will be timed on how long it takes them to say the color of the squares and the color of the words. The research was conducted in the Math Studies class. The participants were aged 16-17 and were students at Garland High School. The results showed that participants took the most time with the incongruent words.
Cognitive psychology studies the way people think an how memory plays a role in people's everyday lives. Memory is important, in both the short-term and the long-term, because without it all actions would have to be innate. Since it has been well-researched that both innate and experiential are needed for people to develop successfully (Sutton, 2008), memory of experiences and the lessons learned are important for every type of functioning. Memory, in the case of the article to be reviewed, is studied with regard to how students retain lists of vocabulary words in a Spanish class. This paper will look at all aspects of the article to determine how the author provided the given information.