Sunny's AP Psychology Blog

Sleep.... or not?

We conducted an experiment wherein Mr.Anthony read out a list of words and we all recalled the list afterwards and wrote down as many as we could remember. We noted an interesting trend as well as a few phenomena related to memory.
The Serial Position Effect was easily noted. The primacy effect, remembering the first parts of a series, took place, with all of the class remembering the first word in the list. The recency effect also took place, with all but one student recalling the last word.
2 students wrote down the word 'sleep.' This word was not part of the list, but all but one word in the list were related to sleep, such as bed, quilt, dark, clock, and night. This is an example of Constructive Memory, memory fabricated out of associations.
As previously mentioned, all the words in the list but one were related to sleep. The one word was 'pineapple.' All but 3 of the students remembered that word, because it stood out. This is called Semantic Distinction.
Every student recalled the work 'night.' This word was read out 3 times throughout the entire list, so it was easier to remember. This demonstrates the effectiveness of Rehearsal.
Although the words 'toss' and 'turn' were read out 9th and 11th in a list of 13 words, the recall for these words was substantially better than that of those words around them, with 11 out of 13 students remembering 'toss' and 9 remembering 'turn.' This phenomenon is due to Chunking; because the two words are normally associated with each other, the students grouped the two words in their minds. I chunked those two words as well, and wrote them down together when recalling the list.

posted by 미카 @ 8:09 AM