An experiment to investigate the effect of depth of processing on memory

Introduction

Imagine one morning you wake up to find you’ve completely lost your memory. How do you feel? You would be unable to neither do many things you take for granted such as remembering your name, age or where you lived nor recognise any familiar faces or voices. You would not recall what you where thinking about few minutes ago or what your plans were for the day, infact you would be absolutely helpless without your memory.

Memory is the process of retaining information after the original is no longer present. There are many links between learning and memory; certain things that are learned and memory are very similar phrases.

Although specialists who theorize behaviourists would dismiss the idea of memory, because they claim memory is more than just learning, suggesting the involvement of cognitive process. It is important to recognise that a normally functioning memory system must be capable of three stages:

Encoding: when information is changed into codes so we are able to make sense of it. For example sound waves are changed into words and words are changed into meanings.

Storage: the information that we encoded then is stored, so it becomes available sometime in the future. Our memory for a word will include memory for how the word sounds like, looks like and what the word means. Different types of information are stored in different ways depending on how we retrieve it.

Retrieval: retrieval occurs when we try to retrieve information from storage. Sometimes we don’t seem to remember something, this maybe because we are unable to retrieve it. For example this can happen when you go to get something from a different room, but as you get to the room you seem to forget what you went in there for. Sometimes returning to the original room often helps us to retrieve the information.

We have looked at some of the research on memory now we will look closely at two models of memory. One of the best-known models of memory is the mutistore model.

R.Atkinson and R.Shiffrin (1968) proposed we pay extra attention to information that enters the sensory memory where it can be registered for short periods of time before its lost through decay or passed on to short-term memory. Short-term memory contains a small amount of information, which is active at one time; it can contain seven items so new information displaces information that is already in there. Short-term ...