An investigation into the effects of generation on memory

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Jenni Pigeon

AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE EFFECTS OF GENERATION ON MEMORY

LAB STUDIES: Hugh Miller

By Jenni Pigeon

Introduction

Memory research is incredibly valuablethe modern world where we have more and more to remember, such as revision at school and university, shopping lists, prospective memory and knowledge of the world.  We have generally become more interested in the ways we can improve our memory, including looking at the meaning and structure of how and what we remember and how we can reduce forgetting.  Teachers and cognitive psychologists have come up with theories for improving memory but there is limited research.  For example they have talked about Spacing Effect, Modality Effect, Bizareness Effect, Encoding-Difficulty Effect and Encoding-Context Effect and more.  Strategies like mnemonics have been thought to help deeper processing and storage but they can only be used for unrelated material.  Slamecka and Graf (1978) talked about the Generation Effect (in particular the Self Generation Effect).  This effect happens when mnemonic aids are self generated which leads to deeper processing, increased meaning and more links to schemas which evidently leads to better memory.  They presented subjects with words that were to be generated by themselves and then the same words that were just to be read.  They also tried variations, such as timed and untimed, but across them all they found that performance was better in the generated word condition than the read condition.  This investigation will replicate the study by Slamecka and Graf with a few differences.  It will be interesting to see if the findings are reproduced.  Rogers, Kuiper and Kirker (1977) studied a similar topic: they came up with the Self Reference Effect which is where material can be made more meaningful or memorable by reference (generation) to the self.  

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Craik and Lockhart (1972) did some research on depths of processing.  They said that long term memory traces are formed at the time of learning depending on the processes that occur.  Deeper levels of analysis will contribute to longer lasting, stronger traces (also developed in Atkinson and Shiffrin’s Multistore Model of Memory).`  This would support the research by Slamecka and Graf and indicate that generation of material will lead to better memory of it.  Miller (1956) mainly spoke about how chunked words will be remembered better but he also stated that people can remember around 7 words or chunks ...

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