Do people remember more words in the morning or afternoon?

 

Hypothesis- people will remember more words in the afternoon than in the morning.

Null hypothesis- people will remember more word in the afternoon than in the afternoon.

Method

The experiment will take place in a quiet classroom and will consist of 10 boys and 10 girls going into the room one at a time. The sample that was used for this experiment was an opportunity sample.

IV- same participants used for both experiments.

DV- change the time of the experiment.

Materials

A piece of paper consisting of 15 words

• Dog        
• Cat
• Book
• Pen
• Table
• Chair
• Fork        
• Knife
• Bat        
• Ball
• Football
• Rugby
• Glass
• Jar
• Scissors  

And a stop watch to time the participants for one minute.

Procedure

At 9.30am one at a time 10 boys and 10 girls were called into the classroom and sat at a desk they were then shown the piece of paper that had the 15 words on and was told they had one minute to look over the words and remember as many as they could in that time. When the minute was up the piece of paper was removed and they were told to call out as many words that was on the piece of paper as they could as they did this the experimenter put a tick next to the words that they remembered this was then recorded. This experiment was then repeated but the following week at 2.30pm.i made sure that I used the same classroom for both experiments and used the same materials and trying to keep them all in the same place so the experiment was fair.

Results

The results showed that more people remembered more words in the afternoon than they did in the morning. Almost all of the participants remembered the first 5 words this is because of the primary affect and shows that these words have gone into the long term memory because the participant has time to rehearse these few words and transfer them from there short term memory and into there long term memory they also remembered the last 3 words this is because they are still in the short term memory because they were the last words they looked at this is called the recency effect.

 

Discussion

The outcome of my experiment has turned out how I wanted it to because it relates to my hypothesis and my aim. The outcome was that the participants remember more word in the afternoon than they do in the morning this may be because in the morning the participants are not fully awake and alert as they are in the afternoon. In the morning the participants kept saying words that wasn’t on the list and could only remember an average of 6 words but in the afternoon the average of words was increased to 9.

Conclusion

Overall the experiment shows that more participants remember more words in the afternoon than they do in the morning. This is probably to do with the fact that in the morning the participants are not fully awake and tend not to concentrate as much as they do in the afternoon.  This seems to agree with the Yerkes-Dodson law of performance and physiological arousal.  Because in the morning the level of arousal is not quite low therefore this can affect a tasks performance where as in the afternoon the level of arousal is much higher so the participant can concentrate a lot better on the task that they are set to do.