Running head: MEMORY SPAN AND WORD EXPERIENCE



Running head: MEMORY SPAN AND WORD EXPERIENCE

Memory Span and Word Experience

Jeremy Owens

Hanover College

Winter 2007

Memory Span and Word Experience

Many cognitive theories propose that there is a short-term system or working memory that allows for temporary storage of a limited amount of information (Francis, Neath, MacKewn, & Goldthwaite, 2004). Working memory is said to be comprised of the functional components of cognition that allow for comprehension and mental representation of people’s immediate environment, the retaining of information about immediate past experience, and to create, relate, and act on current goals (Baddeley, & Logie, 1999). Working memory is a system that temporarily holds and manipulates information as we perform cognitive tasks, and it is through this system that the limits of memory span can be tested (Solso, MacLin, & MacLin, 2005).

The existence of a short-term memory system such as working memory is principally derived from experiments testing types of memory spans (Francis, Neath, MacKewn, & Goldthwaite, 2004). As noted by Miller (1956), the memory span for humans was approximately seven plus or minus two items or chunks. These items can be seen as slots or chunks; they are not necessarily one uniform unit of information and can vary across people. Miller (1956) further noted that since the memory span is a fixed number of chunks, the amount of information remembered can be increased simply by constructing larger chunks. Miller (1956) further notes that these chunks are organized by learning patterns of larger and larger chunks and the amount of information a person can remember increases correspondingly. Through this reasoning, it is reasonable to assume that a person can learn to increase the bits of information per chunk through more experience and practice.

This study will further look into how ones experience with words affects their ability to recall long and short words in comparison to those with less experience with such words through an experiment looking at memory span capabilities. Students will be selected from four different types of majors including: Foreign Language, Math/Economics/CBP majors scored significantly lower than the English/Theater/Classics and Psychology/Sociology to participate in this experiment. After collecting information on their relative experience of using long and short words, a memory span experiment will be used to assess their memory capabilities in these areas. It is expected that those people who have had more practice and exposure to words will do better at recalling such words than those who have not had as much experience.  

Method

Participants

The participants were 23 students from a small Midwestern college who were recruited by the researchers by major type. The age range was 20 to 23. There were 13 males and 10 females. All participants were Caucasian, except for one Hispanic participant. There were six Math/Accounting/CBP majors, 13 English/Theater/Classics majors, and four Psychology/Sociology majors.

Equipment

The program used to run the study and collect the data was called “CogLab,” which was designed by Greg Francis and Ian Neath and ran on a Gateway E Series computer model E4300 with a Pentium 4 processor. The monitor was a flat screen LCD display, model FPD1565. A questionnaire was also distributed (see attached) to assess each participant’s demographic information and previous experience with words and numbers.

Stimulus

The experiment presented five different stimuli: Numbers, Letters that sound different, Letters that sound the same, Short words, and Long words. Each type of stimuli was presented five times, with the lengths of the list changing. Stimuli were presented on the left half of the screen for one second each. After the full list of stimuli were presented, buttons appeared on the right side of the screen to show some of the stimuli just presented and other stimuli of that type that were not shown.

Procedure

The participants were asked to fill out a questionnaire assessing their previous experience with words and numbers. Participants were then instructed to complete the “Memory Span” experiment which was run on the “CogLab” CD. Instructions to the experiment were provided, and the participants were asked to start the trials by pressing the Next Trial Button. Once the trial began, a sequence of one of the five different types of stimuli was presented. When the sequence was finished, the participants were presented with nine buttons to which the participant would click on if they thought they saw that stimulus during the sequence. After each trial, the participant was given feedback whether their answers were Correct or Incorrect before they proceeded to the next trial. Participants had five trials for each of the five stimulus types. If the participant was correct for a given sequence, then the next sequence for that stimulus type would be one item longer, and if a participant was incorrect for a given sequence, the next sequence for that stimulus type would be one item less. The participant’s final list length for each stimulus type was displayed in a separate window when they completed the experiment and were recorded.

Results

Each participant went through five different sequences of each condition and the number of stimuli in each sequence recognized was recorded. The data was then analyzed in a 4 X 5 mixed design ANOVA test with repeated measures.

Analysis found a significant main effect of task on participant performance, F(4, 80) = 11.86, p ................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download