Psychology discussion

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E- Discussion

E1- Relationship to background research:

The findings from this research that trigrams in an organised list will be recalled better than those in a disorganised list have supported the evidence of Millers theory.  Miller (1956) found that the magic number 7+-2 can be increased using the method called chunking. This would relate to this piece of research as the amount of individual letters remembered was a lot bigger than the value 7+-2.  Participants in the organized condition on average recalled about twenty one letters, and in the disorganized condition they recalled about nine letters.  This supports Millers view; that more items can be remembered if they are recalled in “chunks”.  

 This experiment can be extended to investigate the theory of expert chess players having better chunking abilities than novice players (Chase and Simon (1973)).  The expert chess players could recall more information about the relationship of chess pieces than those of amateur chess players, the expert’s could recall up to 30 pieces of information, compared to only seven pieces for amateur players.  This links to my experiment because using the technique chunking on an organised and disorganised list of words, led to an improvement in the number of trigrams recalled in the organised condition rather than the disorganised condition. In the organized list around 21 individual letters were recalled, compared to only 9 in the disorganized list.  This supports Chase and Simons view that chunking can lead to better recall.

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My experiment was based on a previous study by Bowers in 1969; the results produced are similar to those obtained by Bowers.

Table comparing the result of my study and Bowers study:

The results are quite similar although the results above have a higher percentage of words recalled for both the organised and disorganised list compared to Bowers results, however this is due to the fact that more words were involved in Bowers list: - 26 compared to the 10 words used on my list. This will have had an affect on memory as the participant ...

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