Baddley et al in the year 1975 said that one syllable words are easier to remember that longer words.
Naveh-Benjamin and Ayres in the year 1986 also agreed with Baddley, in the experiments that they carried out, proving that it is easier to memorise the English language much more efficiently than the Arabic language.
Free Recall Experiments.
Free recall experiments are also very supportive of the Multi-store Model. Murdock in the year 1962 carried out these free recall experiments, which consisted of participants having to remember a list of words, and then to recall them. Murdock found that the participants remembered the first few words of the list and the last few words of the list. These effects were called the primacy effect (where participants tend to remember the first words of the list, because they had stored the words in the LTM) and the Recency effect (this is where participants could recall only the last few words of the list.)
Amnesia Case Studies
Amnesia studies by several well known psychologists from around the world also help to back up the idea of the multi-store model.
The case of Clive Wearing in studied by Baddley in the year 1997 was one of the major studies of Amnesia. Clive Wearing suffered retrograde amnesia and could not recall his past as a musician or his friends, which meant that his LTM was impaired. Also his STM was impaired as he could hardly recall new information- if his wife went out of the room and re-entered he would greet her very emotionally.
Miller 1966 investigated the case of HM who could not recall any new
Information. This is Anterograde Amnesia.
Shallice and Warrington in the year 1970 investigated KF, who had suffered a severe motorcycle accident, he had no problem remembering his past, but he could not remember the present day to day activities that he indulged in. This meant that he had impaired his STM, and without his STM he could not process new information into his LTM.
Aim:
To investigate gender differences in the Capacity of the STM.
Hypothesis:
The gender will have a certain effect on Short Term Memory.
Method:
Design:
An Independent Measures Design was manipulated/interrogated into the experiment. The experiment was carried out inside the psychology classroom; this is a place where we are usually taught our psychology lessons.
Subjects/Participants:
All of the subjects were A/s students from the Joseph Chamberlain College; they were all definitely studying psychology along with other subjects.
Although it is a rather large assumption to make, all of the students have similar IQ levels, as they all have managed to get good grades to enter the College. (We will not take into consideration the fact that some of them may have just managed to get enough grades, and some passed their exams brilliantly)
Apparatus/Materials:
- Stimulus Material list (15 words)
- Clock/Stopwatch
- Over Head Projector (OHP)
- Room
- Pen
- Paper
- OHT
Procedure:
The experiment was carried out in the following manner:
The OHP was used to project a list of 15 words on the board (the list consisted of names of fruits and animals), a clock was used to measure the time to accurately 15 seconds and then the OHP was turned off.
The students than had to recall in total silence (so as to reduce the risk of students sharing or coping answers) as much of the list as they could remember.
Results:
From the raw results that we have gained we can not tell much, however when interpreted, they gave us a formal overview of the correct results. One way of interpreting the result is to create graphs that will show the mean and the mode.
Disscusions:
The results that I have got are very representative of the pupils that were experimented on, however the results on the other hand do not agree with some of the points that was made earlier in the introduction.
We can now safely conclude that the average of the results, as seen from the graphs in the above page, are as follows:
*the mean, mode, median were originally calculated from the raw data, in the results section.
Thus we can now say that the boys had a mean number of words remembered as 10.2 and the median as 12, proving that the short term memory capacity of the boys is definitely greater, as they tend to recall more.
The mode however was 10 for both genders meaning that if the results was to be generalised the we could say that both sexes had the same capacity in the short term memory.
Also the experiment that was carried out contained a few flaws, firstly there was the error mentioned earlier of assuming that everyone had the same IQ levels, this was a huge assumption as some students could have had only five GCSE passes whereas other’s could have had 12 to get into the course, meaning that the teacher had no knowledge of the past of the students.
Another flaw with the design was the influence of the Long term memory, the list of words consisted of animal names and the names of various fruits and vegetables. The list was constructed as follows:
- Horse
- Potato
- Carrot
- Banana
- Snake
- Apple
- Onion
- Dolphin
- Tomato
- Monkey
- Grapes
- Cucumber
- Orange
- Gorilla
- Whale
Thirdly the participants could have employed various strategies to remember the words, if some participants were familiar with a certain strategy then they could have used that. Meaning that some participants had a better way of remembering – thus we can also add that different people use different methods to store items into memories, some of these methods are particularly favourable to some people. Individual differences can also influence the results.
Finally structured learning techniques could have had shaped the results, as some people can automatically relate words, for example the ‘Monkey, Gorilla and the Banana’ all fit together, as does the ‘dolphin and the whale’.
Miller 1956 mentioned that the recall of people was usually seven plus two or seven minus two. This theory however does not fit into my results as the mean, mode, and the median proved that the recall was much more higher for both of the groups. This could be favourable towards the fact that we have used words which the participants are very familiar with since they have learnt the names of these animals and the names of these fruits and vegetables since they were very young, which means that they are words which are from the long term memory; these words have been revised and repeated for many years.
Baddley in the year 1975 conducted a experiment, later redone by Naveh-Benjamin and Ayres in the year 1986 concluded that the English language was easier to memorise, rather than the Arabic language.
The fact that the words are from the English language, also works against our result as they are easier to remember; though our experiment clearly agrees with this experiment.
Murdock in the year 1962 carried out his Free recall Experiments, which were very similar to our experiments, expect that he used non sense trigrams, which had no effect from the Long term memory.
