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Theory Of Context-Dependant Memory

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The primary purpose of the research was to investigate whether the distraction condition affected learning and memory. According to the theory of context dependant memory (Tulving, 1983) and music dependant memory (Smith, 1985; Balch, et al., 1992), we hypothesized that participants who listened to their randomly assigned music type at both encoding and retrieval would have higher recall scores than participants who were randomly assigned to only hear the music at encoding. The results did not support this hypothesis as there was not a significant main effect of distraction condition. This is contrary to Balch, et al. and does not support the theory of music-dependant memory as it concerns immediate recall. As we were only able to test participants …show more content…

The biggest limitation, as mentioned above, was the lack of ability to complete a delayed recall test. This caused the experiment to lack the ability provide replicated or contrasting results from Smith’s experiment (1985). The current study also yielded a small number of participants, which limited not only the sample size of the groups, but also the number of groups. If more participants were available, a control group would have been helpful to provide more data and further understand the results. Larger groups may have also made the results more reliable. Additionally, it would have been useful to further subdivide the music type condition. While we utilized popular music and instrumental music, these two conditions differ not only on the type of music but also, as the results showed, on the familiarity with the music. Therefore it would have been useful to include instrumental music with which the participants were familiar in addition to popular music with which the participants were unfamiliar. This would help to tease apart whether the results were due to the music’s type or the music’s familiarity. It would also be useful to use more specific categories of music, instead of simply popular music and instrumental, for instance rock, alternative, reggae, and jazz also need to be further studied in order to determine whether different types of music have differing effects on learning and recall. This was done in both …show more content…

While our study was built only to detect an effect of music-dependant memory on immediate recall, it would be interesting to see if results changed after two days, as seen in Smith (1985) and Balch et al. (1992) or when testing the participants on recall after a week, as can be seen in Roediger & Karpicke (2005), or perhaps longer. When you consider the effect of remembering childhood memories when hearing a song from that time in your childhood, it would be especially interesting to conduct a similar study that spanned many years, to determine if music-dependant memory is applicable over a long period of

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