Aim: To find out whether interference plays a part in the loss of a memory, with smell as the interferer.
Procedure:
- Set off thirteen words is randomly chosen, however all being interlinked. This is known as semantic memory.
- Then a group of 20 students are asked to participate in the experiment.
- They are all shown the set of words for one minute then the words are taken away.
- They are then asked to recall the words, without looking at anyone else’s answers to show how much they can remember.
- After 24 hours the group of 20 are split into 2groups containing 10 people in each group.
- One half of the group is kept in the same condition as it was before which took place in a classroom with no interference.
- However group 2 are taken away and are placed in an environment, which contain a smell of incense.
- Then both groups are told to recall the words, which they were showed yesterday, so that we could see whether the smell had interfered in the learning and remembering process.
Words Used: image, picture, photograph, landscape, portrait, paints, pencils, colours, black, white, oil, light and camera.
Prediction: I predict that the group that had no interference will be able to recall more words than the group who have the interference.
Findings: We found that the participants that had not been kept in a scented room recalled more words than the participants that had been kept in a scented room. We also found that the people would put the word smell or fragrance or a word associated with the smell as one of the words from yesterday.
TEST 1with all participants TEST2 no smell TEST2 with smell
Conclusion: I think that forgetting happens as we get older and start to find better things which we need to know more interesting rather than the things that we don’t need to know. However, it was concluded that the smell played the part well as an interferer as the aim was successful and we were able to see the difference between the amount of words recalled before and after, plus the change with the smell.
Criticisms: There are many factors we could list that criticise the method we used to perform our test on the participants involved. We could quite easily say that our test was a highly accurate experiment if the criticisms I’m about to elaborate on were taken out of account.
Firstly, the area we used was an attraction for many distractions for example, people outside the room talking and slamming doors. Factors such as these could easily break someone’s concentration and in the limited amount of time we gave the participants, time was extremely important. The room also had factors that could contribute to the participants including more words on their sheet. Our semantically similar words were all related to the word “picture” in some way, and the room we used had many things that could have reminded the participants of quite a few of them.
Also, we performed the experiment on a limited amount of people, and if we done it on more, we would have had a greater and broader view on the results and conclusion. The experiment was only done once and was rushed as the buzzer for our next lesson was taking away our time, and prevented a relaxed and calm environment for our participants to undertake our test. If I were to perform the experiment again I would do it at least three times and work out an average.
Also, we only used semantically similar words, which do not require a photographic memory to remember. In other words, they are not too hard to remember. We could have used separate groups and tested them on acoustically similar, semantically similar, acoustically dissimilar and semantically dissimilar words to find a much more accurate conclusion.
