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