Introduction
Since 1950s, the concept of chunking has continued to fascinate psychologists as it appears to have important operations of cognition in which offering guides to explore more about the fundamental cognitive processes of the brain. The concept of chunking was first introduced by Harvard psychologist, George A. Miller who studied the capabilities of human short term memory by conducting an experiment that resulted in the typical storage holding capacity for short-term memory is seven plus or minus two items. He also discovered that a process of coding information into larger chunks can significantly enhance the words one can remember and recall.
The aim of replicating and modifying this study is to compare the number of words memorized by a group of participants who used a list of random words versus a group of participants who used a list of related words.
Methodology o Design
The design was a laboratory experiment, which allows the experimenter to establish a cause-effect relationship between the independent and the dependent variable.
The independent variable (IV) was the use of the different list of words; random words vs related words. The dependent variable (DV) was the different number of words and the operationalisation of variables was the number of words recalled from the two different word lists.
The control group was the group given a list of 20 random words and the experiment group was the group given a list of 20 related words. Random group allocation of participants to both of the two conditions was used to counter-balance the individual differences of the participants.
In order to follow the ethical considerations, experimenter informed all the participants that they have the right to withdraw...
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The ethical guidelines were followed because experimenter did not harm any humans nor animals.
Materials o Consent form o Debriefing form o Powerpoint presentation o Picture of a list of random words o Stopwatch
Results
It was hypothesized that the group of participants who used a list of random words would more likely to remember fewer words compare to the group of participants who used a list of related words and results in the data table below confirmed the hypothesis to be true. In figure 1, the mean is used to be a summary statistic that shows where the centre of the datasets; list of random words, list of related words and number of words recalled. Whereas the standard deviation is the measure of central tendency and gives a better picture of the data. The smaller the value of standard deviation, the greater the data concentrated around the mean.
Using Chunking to Increase Capacity of STM The aim of the investigation was to repeat the experiment carried out by Bower and Springston in 1970. A laboratory experiment was carried out to demonstrate how chunking could be used to increase the capacity of STM. Participants were presented with a letter sequence. The independent variable was the chunking and the dependent variable was how many letters the participants recalled. A repeated measures design was used and the participants were an opportunist sample of 20 students, between the ages of 16-18 years.
The first study I reviewed was “Creating False Memories: Remembering Words Not Presented in Lists” by Roediger III and Kathleen B. McDermott. The study was published in 1995, in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory & Cognition. Roediger and McDermott conducted two separate experiments in their study. The experiments were modeled after Deese’s 1959 study “On the Prediction of Occurrences of Particular Verbal Intrusions in Immediate Recall.” The results of Deese’s study concluded that participants falsely recalled a nonpresented critical lure 44% of the time. 36 students from Rice University participated in Roediger and McDermott’s first experiment. The students participated as part of a course project. The participants were presented with six lists that were developed from Deese’s study and Russell and Jenkins 1954 study “The complete Minnesota norms for responses to 100 words from the Kent-Rosanoff word association Test.” The six lists that were chosen for the Roediger and McDermott study were shown to elicit high rates of false recall in Deese’s study. The list contained 12 associated words that related to one nonpresented word. An example nonpresented word is chair, the 12 associated w...
Participants were told that they did not need to remember category headings. When tested after, participants given category headings were able to recall more words than those who were not. The participants recalled 20% more in cued recall than free recall. Assuming this, the free recall group could have recalled as many as the cued recall group if to were given the cues, therefore the information was there to be accessed but unavailable due to absence of cues. In other words, their poor recall was due to retrieval failure.
Quasi-experimental designs are experimental designs that do not provide for the full control of extraneous variables. Primarily, the absence of control in this design is due to the lack of random assignment to groups. Quasi-experimental research designs are used in the study of cause and effect by manipulating the independent variable.
Experimental research is the one type of research that allows psychologists to make causal statements. It is where the researcher changes one or more variables that may have an effect on some other variables (King, 2016). The hypothesis is a specific expectation about what is going to happen in the experiment (King, 2016). In the research, the hypothesis was that women would perceive fat talk to be more socially acceptable than men (Katrevich et al., 2014). The other elements of experimental method are dependent and independent variables. The independent variable (IV) is the cause of the results, and it is changed by the experimenter to find the effects, but the dependent vari...
Revlin, Russell. "Short Term Memory and Working Memory." Cognition: theory and practice. New York, NY: Worth Publishers, 2013. 118-149. Print.
Altogether this study has helped us learn more about the brain and memory. Learning is measured thorough when a student can reiterate the right answer to a question. In this study, students in one conditions learned forging language vocabulary words in standard example of recurrent study exam trials. In three other conditions, once a student had correctly formed the language item, it was constantly studied but dropped from further testing. Repeatedly tested but dropped from the further study or just dropped from both the study and also the test. The results reveal the critical part of retrieval practice in combining education and shows that even college students seem naive of the fact.
...Baddeley (1966) study of encoding in the short term memory and long term memory supports the MSM model on the mode of processing such that words are processed on recall and both models share the same opinion that processing does influence recall. Finally, the MSM model of memory states that all information is stored in the long term memory, however, this interpretation contrasts with that of Baddeley (1974) who argue that we store different types of memories and it is unlikely that they occur only in the LTM store. Additionally, other theories have recognised different types of memories that we experience, therefore it is debatable that all these different memories occur only in the long-term memory as presumed by the multi-store model which states the long term memory store as with unlimited capacity, in addition it also fails to explain how we recall information.
Human memory is flexible and prone to suggestion. “Human memory, while remarkable in many ways, does not operate like a video camera” (Walker, 2013). In fact, human memory is quite the opposite of a video camera; it can be greatly influenced and even often distorted by interactions with its surroundings (Walker, 2013). Memory is separated into three different phases. The first phase is acquisition, which is when information is first entered into memory or the perception of an event (Samaha, 2011). The next phase is retention. Retention is the process of storing information during the period of time between the event and the recollection of a piece of information from that event (Samaha, 2011). The last stage is retrieval. Retrieval is recalling stored information about an event with the purpose of making an identification of a person in that event (Samaha, 2011).
McNamara, T. P. and Holbrook, J. B. 2003. Semantic Memory and Priming. Handbook of Psychology. 445–474.
The human brain consists of many subsystems within the long-term memory. One of which is episodic memory. Episodic Memory is the remembrance of a phenomenal personal experience in terms of what, when, and where. This memory begins by retrieving information such as, words, objects, or faces; using this knowledge the episodic memory finds links and slowly transitions into recalling the complete memoir. Research studies established by Herlitz, Nilsson, and Backman prove that sex differences favor women when it comes to episodic memory. In this research experiment these psychologists took about 1,000 applicants, both male and female, between ages of 35 – 80, and asked them to remember a list of words; the study showed that women outperformed men by 25 percent. Coming to the conclusion that, since women were able to recall more words than men they evidently had the better episodic memory.
The serial position effect has been studied extensively for many years. Researchers have designed a variety of different studies in order to analyze and explain both, the primacy and the recency effect. The primacy effect is the tendency for the first items presented in a series of words to be recalled more easily, or to be more influential than those presented at the end of the list. On the other end, there is also the recency effect. The recency effect is the tendency to recall the items located at the end of the list. Many studies have been designed to analyze how the primacy effect works and its accuracy. For instance, research compared the primacy and the recency effect (Jahnke, 1965). Forty-eight college students read lists of 6, 10, and 15 English words in a counterbalanced order. Twenty-four of the students were given instructions for the immediate serial recall of the list; while the other half of students were not aware that they would need to recall words from a list. Both groups received a total of 12 different lists. The words were read at a rate of one word per sec without any emphasis on specific word. In addition to that, the participants’ responses were recorded in an interval of 30 seconds. Results showed that the recency effect is stronger for free serial recall and for a longer interval than primacy effect (Jahnke, 1965). When instructions were given for a serial recall, primacy effects were stronger and recency effect weaker than when instructions were given for free recall. As the length of lists increased, the recency effect became stronger and more accurate.
...re I think if the participants are not aware of it, the false recall rate will increase. And if there are more words presented, my assume is that it will increase the false recall rate.
Atkinson, R.C. & Shiffrin, R.M. (1968). Human memory: A proposed system and its control process.
The focus on the phonological mental memory was first initiated by Paul Meara (1980). He argued that the organization of words in memory depend on the phonological knowledge of the words in second language acquisition. However, in first language acquisition the memory depends on the semantic knowledge. Mear (1980) conducted a study on lexical performance in fir...