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