The present study aimed to measure the effect of different types of organized lists on recall. Participants were randomly assigned into two groups and was presented with either a list of words organized Alphabetically (N=10) under the words corresponding letters or words organized in a Schedule (N=11), categorized under ellipses labeled with parts of a day-"Morning", "Afternoon", and "Evening" . Each list contained the same 90 words sans the organization of the list. Participants in both groups studied their respective list and recalled as many words as they could remember by writing them down afterwards in both trials under a restricted period of time. It was predicted, the mean of correct word recall would increase for both groups across trials. Although statistical significance was not met, mean of correct word recall was higher in the group with Schedule list organization than the group with the Alphabetized list. These findings led to the conclusion that the organization of word lists aids in associating words in categories which facilitate in higher recall. Similarly, these predictions were consistent with findings of Bower and Clark-Meyers (1980) , Bower, Clark, Lesgold, and Winzenz (1969), and Calfee and Peterson (1968).
Keyword: Recall, organization, word lists, memory, categories
The Effect of Different Types of Organized Lists on Word Recall
The study of human memory has stirred many interests in research. The process of memory is encoding, storing, and retrieving information. Learning is aided by the ability to store newly formed memories for periods of time and recalling them when needed. One of the main components in memory is the short-term memory (STM), which is responsible for storing infor...
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...tegory 2. Park-> kitchen, bedroom, stove) . When cued by an unrelated category, participants would be required to recall as many correct words under that specific unrelated category. This will test if categorical influence spans over words that are incongruent with the category they are in and if associations are formed regardless simply because of categorical organization.
Works Cited
Bower, H.G., Clark, C.M., Lesgold, M.A., & Winzenz, D. (1969). Hierarchal retrieval schemes in recall of categorized word lists. Journal of Verbal and Verbal Behavior,
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Bower, H.G. & Clark-Meyers, G.(1980). Memory for scripts with organized vs. randomized presentations. British Journal of Psychology, 71, p.369-377.
Calfee, C.R. & Peterson, E.R. (1968). Effect of list organization on short-term probe recall.
Journal of Experimental Psychology, 78, p.468-474.
Roediger III, H. L., & McDermott, K. B. (1995). Creating False Memories: Remembering Words Not Presented in Lists. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cogntion, 21, 803-814.
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.
Harvey et al (2000) also used the word list learning and delayed recall, pranix drawing, modified Boston Naming test and CERAD to assess cognitive function of both their control and experimental populations. The word list learning and delayed recall is a ten item list of words that is presented to the subject during three separate trials. After each trial the subject is asked to freely recall the words from the list. After a delay, which is filled with the pranix drawing task, the participants are asked to recall the list of words once again. The dependent variable in this task is the number of words recalled over the three trials and the number of words that were recalled after the delay. The scores ranged from 0 to 20 based the...
Memory is an important and active system that receives information. Memory is made up of three different stages sensory memory, short term memory, and long term memory. According to the power point presentation, sensory memory refers to short storage of memory that allows an individual to process information as it occurs. Short term memory refers to memory that is only available for a limited time. It is information that is held for seconds or sometimes even minutes. Long term memory refers to memory that is stored for a long period of time and it has an unlimited capacity with the ability to hold as much information as possible. Retrieval is key and it allows individuals to have memories. Episodic memory refers to memory for events that we
The second stage of memory processing is storage. Aronson et al. (2013) defines storage as the process by which people store the information they just acquired. Unfortunately, memories are affected by incoming information through alteration or reconstruction. This phenomenon is referred to as recon...
Memory is a group of related mental processes that are involved in acquiring, storing, and retrieving information (Hockenberry and Hocenberry page 232). I will be addressing two specific types of memory: short-term memory and long-term memory. Short-term memory holds temporary information transferred from sensory memory or long-term memory. Sensory memory is the first stage of memory and obtains information for a brief amount of time. Short-term memory is also called active memory and is stored in the prefrontal cortex which is the most active part of the brain during an activity. Short-term memory can hold information for roughly twenty seconds, but sensory memory holds information for a shorter amount of time. We usually store things such
...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).
Making and storing memories is a complex process involving many regions of the brain. (3). Most experts agree that we have two stages of memories - short-term memory and long-term memory. Short-term memory is the immediate memory we have when we first hear or perceive someth...
McCloskey, M. & Glucksberg, S. (1979). Decision processes in verifying category membership statements: Implications for models of semantic memory. Cognitive Psychology, 11(1), 1-37.
Furthermore this article expands upon this subcategory of memory by describing the two types of tasks involved with it: verbal-production ta...
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.
Roediger, H. L. III, & McDermott, K. B. (1995). Creating false memories: Remembering words not presented in lists. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 21, 803-814
In daily life, memory is used all the time. When we go to buy things, we would remember the list of items what we are going to buy. At school, we would also need to have revision in order to remember the materials for examination. Or even, when we meet friends, we would also need to recall their names. Thus it is important to know and understand how we remember such things so that we can effectively recall them when necessary. Obviously, we do not need to remember the exact position or order of things in daily life. We would have our own pattern for remember and retrieve information (Ashcraft, 2010). This is named as free recall, which items recalled in any order (Francis, Neath, MacKewn and Goldthwaite, 2004). However, many researchers found that the probability of recalling items (such as words, letters, or numbers) does in fact depend on the items position in a list. The most striking finding is that words at the beginning and end of the list are often easier to recall than those words in the middle of the list. Thus, when the results of a free recall experiment are plotted on a graph; a u-shaped serial position curve can be obtained. This is often referred to as the serial position effect that is affecting our memory (Smith, n.d.).
This phenomenon of memory has been tested many times using the Wadsworth CogLab false memory experiment. In the Wadsworth experiment, participants are presented with a list of words each of which is shown for one and half seconds. These experiments usually entail six trial lists. After each list is shown, the participants are given a set of response buttons labeled with the words from the list. The buttons also include normal distractor words (a word that is unrelated to the list but was not shown), and special distractor words (a word that is related