Instructions – Condition 1
For this experiment, we will read out 10 pairs of words for you to remember e.g. grass-plate. After we have read out the word pairs, we will repeat one word from each pair and you will have to name the other word in that pair e.g. we will say grass and you will say plate.
Instructions – Condition 2
For this experiment, we will read out 10 pairs of words for you to remember e.g. clock-river. After we have read out the word pairs, we will repeat one word from each pair and you will have to name the other word in that pair e.g. we will say clock and you will say river. You must use a certain method we have designed for this experiment, which is called “word imagery”. For each word pair, you must associate one word with the other e.g. for clock-river, try to imagine a river filled with clocks floating along.
Debriefing
For both experiments, we used word pairs to find results for a memory test. For Condition 1, we told the participants to try to remember 10 pairs of words and when we said one word from the pair, they would try to say the other word. No special technique was told to be used in Condition 1. For Condition 2, the same test was used but the participant was asked to remember the word pairs by using word imagery, which involved associate one word with the other by “mentally merging” the images of each word. We are trying to find out if using imagery to remember words is a better method than simply trying to remember them.
Thank you again for participating in this experiment. Your results were very important in advancing our knowledge of memory.
