exp #5: the rumor chain activity*

The 5th memory test was conducted with 3 volunteers. The first person stayed in the room and the other 3 was asked to leave. Mr. Anthony then read out a story about a hijacker on a plane and Pang was told to remember as much as possible. Then Maytee came into the room and Pang was asked to retell the story to him, then he did the same thing when Daniel came in. Daniel then retold the story to the class. Here is the story:

A Qantas International 747 that was going to Los Angeles took off the Bangkok International Airport. A passenger near the rear of the aircraft announced that he was hijacking for the People’s Revolutionary Army.
The Hijacker then held a 357 magnum gun to the head of Jack Straw, a flight attendant, and forced him to open the cockpit door. There the hijacker held the gun at the head of the pilot, Jane Smith, and forced her to change course to Cuba. While the pilot radioed Bangkok to report the situation she suddenly threw the microphone at the hijacker who fell backwards through the open cockpit door and onto the floor.
The angry passengers forced the gun off him and tied him up. The plane returned to Bangkok and in a few minutes the hijacker was arrested.

One thing that was very significant that we found is leveling, or simplifying material. We noticed that the story got shorter and shorter as more and more detail was lost. Another important thing we saw was sharpening, or highlighting or emphasizing some material; in this particular story retelling, the details about the gun and the plane stayed even thought the story was retold 3 times. Assimilation also happened—it is changing details to better fit the subjects’ own background or knowledge, or schemas. We found that they were more focused on the schema of the pilot and the flight attendant and forgot about the passengers completely. Also, although in the story the pilot was a woman and the flight attendant a man, as the story was repeated the pilot turned into a man and the stewardess into a woman. They changed crucial information due to the schema in their minds. We then discussed how real eye-witness accounts and rumors are not very reliable some of the time because the story somehow changes each time it is retold.

-- yuki

exp #4: all purpose memory activity*

Today we did our 4th memory experiment. We were instructed to listen to 14 words, read aloud immediately one after the other. At the end, we were given a while to write down all the words. The words were: bed, quilt, dark, sleep, silence, fatigue, clock, snoring, night, toss, tired, artichoke, turn, rest and dream. The entire class scored pretty high on this test; I was surprised to find that I actually remembered all the words.

Looking at the results, we found 5 understandings about memory. Firstly, this test showed the serial-position effect, which is when the first (primary) and last (recent) items are remembered best. For example, everybody remembered the first word ‘bed’ and 6 people remembered the last word ‘dream’ because we tend to remember earlier items and the things we heard last. Secondly, we found that words that have semantic distinctiveness, or a particular word that has a meaning that stands out or is dissimilar, are remembered pretty well. For example, the word ‘artichoke’ which had no close relationship with all the other words stood out to us and that is why we remembered it. Thirdly, we found that rehearsal improves recall. The word ‘night’ was repeated 3 times, and everybody remembered it and wrote it down. Fourthly, we discovered that we have memory reconstruction, where we fall back on the schema that we already have in our head because the words are related to each other. Therefore, 3 people wrote down a word that wasn’t there: ‘sleep’. This is because sleep was related to almost all the other words; an interesting thing we thought about was that people who wrote down ‘sleep’ were more creative than others. Lastly, we found that chunking helps with memory. The words ‘toss’ and ‘turn’ could be chunked together because they are often seen together in the English language.

-- yuki

exp #3: memory enhances recall*

Today we did our 3rd memory experiment as a class. Mr. Anthony read out 20 words on 20 separate sheets while letting us see the words as he held it up. The sensory inputs were the sight and sound of the words. At the bottom of each sheet was either letter ‘A’ or ‘B’; we were supposed to count the syllables in the word if we saw an ‘A’ and think about whether it was pleasant or unpleasant when we saw a ‘B’. I remembered a total of 12 words, and remembered 4 ‘A’ words and 8 ‘B’ words.

When we combined the results from the whole class, we found that the highest score was 19, and the lowest score was 6. The mean of the number of ‘A’ words people recalled was 5.09 words, the mean of the number of ‘B’ words people recalled was 7.09 words, and the mean of the total number of words people recalled was 12.27 words. There were 2 people with an equal number of ‘A’ and ‘B’ words, 2 people with more ‘A’s than ‘B’s, and 7 people with more ‘B’s than ‘A’s.

In this particular task, we did effortful processing. The reason most people remembered more ‘B’ words than ‘A’ words is because when we tried to think whether it is pleasant or unpleasant, we were giving the words meaning. Meaning enhances recall, and that is why we remembered more ‘B’ words. When we tried to retrieve the words from our long term memory, more ‘B’ words came because it has more ‘power’; we gave meaning to it. Conversely, when we were asked to count the syllables in the ‘A’ words, we were not giving it enough meaning and therefore we did not remember many. The person with the highest score scored very well because he used a mnemonic device to help him recall things easily—he made up his own story using the words. We found that the crazier the story, the more easily we can recall it. Also, we found that those who scored the least either had distractions, misunderstandings, or exhaustion—which are all factors that may affect our ability to encode all the words into our memory.

-- yuki

exp #2: short term memory activity*

The instructions were to listen to a sequence of numbers and write them down after they were read out. Starting from 3 digits, we went up to 12 digit letters. The most I could remember were 8 digits, and started getting the rest wrong. When we organized the results as a class, we found out that the average number of digits people could remember is 6.5. Comparing it to the average capacity of short term memory of world, with is 7 +/- 2, we were pretty close to the value.

We found that it was the most difficult to remember the digits in the middle, because the first and last digits are most memorable to us. Because we couldn’t attach meaning to it, it is very difficult to remember the numbers with many digits. Also, there might have been distractions in the surroundings or just bad luck. However, we found a solution to remembering things better: chunking, or separating the numbers into different groups, we can process more pieces of information; for example, 1914 1918 1939 1945 because they are significant dates.

-- yuki

exp #1: my first memory*

The instructions were to recall the first memory that each person in the class experienced. My first memory was when I was about 3 years old and in a Japanese nursery school in Tokyo. I was drawing and coloring on butcher paper with a group of other children in a typical Japanese classroom with a teacher. I remember this blonde girl particularly well because she was really mean to the other kids. Then we shared our first memories, and found that the mean age when our first memory occurs is around 3 to 4 years old.

However, we found out that this is highly unlikely because we can only start remembering things when we are 4-5 years old, and the reason we think we remember things before that is because of pictures and other people telling us about our first memory. Out of all the memories, we found that around half of them were sad (throwing up, falling, crying), and the other half was happy memories (playing, eating, school), and this is significant because we discovered that memories have emotional elements that make them memorable. Memories are usually malleable; they are flexible and somewhat reconstructed from various elements. Most of the time, it is like watching a video of ourselves in an omnipotent way.

-- yuki