Levels of Processing Report

Abstract

These experiments were based on the levels of processing theory by Craik and Lockhart, 1972. The experiments used graphemic word which were represented by capitals, phonemic words represented by rhyme and semantic words represented by adjectives. All 55 (n=55) participants were asked to follow the instruction in the brackets next to the word being presented to them, e.g., tree(adjective) where the answer could be ‘green’, ‘tall’, ‘leafy’ etc. They were given approximately 5-10 seconds to write down their responses until the next word was presented to them. They were then asked to write down the original word that was presented to them on a new piece of paper. The results from the experiment were significant at the p<.001 level, F(2, 108) = 57.46 and a Bonferoni post hoc test was carried out because a directional hypothesis was predicted. This revealed a mean difference between graphemic and phonemic words of 1.69, phonemic and semantic of 1.56 and graphemic and semantic of 3.26, all at a significance level of .001. Therefore, the H1: Deeper levels of processes will result in better recall of words was accepted. These results do support Craik and Lockharts 1972 study.

Introduction

The Levels of Processing Theory put forward by Craik and Lockhart, 1972 was as a result of the criticism of the multi-store model. Instead of concentrating on the stores/structures involved (i.e. STM & LTM), this theory concentrates on the processes involved in memory. Unlike the multi-store model it is a non-structured approach. The basic idea is that memory is really just what happens as a result of processing information. They propose that memory is just a by-product of the depth of processing of information and there is no clear distinction between STM & LTM. Craik & Lockhart (1972) claimed that stimulus inputs undergo successive processing operations. Information can be processed in 2 ways, the first of which is Shallow Processing which takes two forms. The first is Structural processing (appearance) which is when only the physical qualities of something are encoded, e.g. the typeface of a word or how the letters look and the second is Phonemic processing which is when its sound is encoded. Shallow processing only involves maintenance rehearsal, which is the process of repetition to help hold something in the STM and leads to fairly short-term retention of information. This is the only type of rehearsal to take place within the multi-store model. The second way in which information can be process is Deep Processing in the form of Semantic processing, which happens when the meaning of a word is encoded and it relates to similar words with similar meaning. Deep processing involves extensive rehearsal. This involves a more meaningful analysis (e.g. images, thinking, associations etc.) of information and leads to better recall. For example, giving words a meaning or linking them with previous knowledge. The crucial assumption of this theory is that retention of information is dependent on the depth or level of processing carried out on the item that is to be remembered material. Shallow processing leads only to shallow, short-term retention; deep processing leads to efficient, long-lasting retention, (Eysenck, 2004).

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A study was carried out by Elias & Perfetti (1973), where they gave participants tasks to perform on words in a list, such as finding another word that rhymes or finding a word that has a similar meaning to the word on the list. The rhyming task involved only audio coding and therefore, was a shallow level of processing. The similar task involved semantic coding and was therefore, a deep level of processing. The participants were not informed that they would be asked to recall the words; however, they were able to recall some of the words when they were tested. This task is known as incidental learning as opposed to intentional or deliberate learning. The participants recalled significantly more words following the similar words task than the rhyming task, which suggested that deeper levels of processing leads to better recall, (Davey, 2004).

Another study carried out by Hyde & Jenkins (1973) was an experiment using the incidental learning technique. The experiment involved different groups of participants who performed one of the following five tasks on a list of words:

rating the words for pleasantness (e.g. is ‘donkey’ a pleasant word?),
estimating the frequency with which each word is used in the English language (e.g. how often does ‘donkey’ appear in the English language?),
detecting the occurrence of the letters ‘e’ & ‘g’ in the list words (e.g. is there an ‘e’ or a ‘g’ in the word ‘donkey’?),
deciding the part of speech appropriate to each word (e.g. is ‘donkey’ a verb, noun or an adjective?),
deciding whether the words fitted into particular sentences (e.g. does the word ‘donkey’ fit into the following sentence: “I went to the doctor and showed him my ............”) (Eysenck, 2004).

Five groups of participants performed one of these tasks, without having the knowledge that they would be asked to recall the words. An additional five groups of participants performed the tasks but they were informed that they should learn the words. Finally, there was a control group of participants who were instructed to learn the words but not take part in the tasks. All groups were given a test of free recall shortly after completion of the task. Hyde & Jenkins findings showed that the pleasantness rating and rating frequency of usage tasks produced the best recall. They argued that this was due to the fact that these tasks involved semantic processing in comparison to the other tasks. An interesting finding that arose from this experiment was that incidental learners performed just as well as intentional learners in all tasks. This suggests that it is the nature of the processing that determines how much a person will remember rather than intention to learn, (Davey, 2004).

It can be said that in most cases, deeper levels of processing do lead to better recall. However, an argument about whether it is the depth of processing that leads to better recall or the amount of processing effort that produces the result. Tyler et al (1979) gave his participants two sets of anagrams to solve - easy ones, such as DOCTRO or difficult ones such as TREBUT. Afterwards, the participants were given an unexpected test for recall of the anagrams. According to Tyler et al, although the processing level was the same, because the participants were processing on the basis of meaning, they were able to remember more of the difficult anagram words than the easy ones. So Tyler et al concluded that retention is a function of processing effort, not processing depth, (Eysenck, 2004).

The aim of this experiment was to see whether or not deeper levels of processing result in the better recall of words.

H1: Deeper levels of processes will result in better recall of words

H0: Deeper levels of processes will not result in better recall of words

Method

Design

This experiment consisted of a repeat measures ANOVA test which was not counter balanced and instead the words were randomly presented in the same order to all participants. All participants took part in each condition.

There was one Independent Variable (IV) which was an incidental learning task at encoding consisting of 3 conditions, graphemic words represented by capitals, Phonemic words represented by rhymes and Semantic words represented by adjectives. The Dependent Variable (DV) was the number of words recalled.

Participants

The total number of participants was 55. All participants for this experiments were first year psychology students aged 18+, where the majority of these students were mature adults. There were a predominantly large number of female students. The participation in this experiment was on a voluntary basis for all students that took part as a component of their psychology course.

Materials

A list of words was presented to the participants with an instruction next to them which they were required to follow. There were 3 types of instructions the participants were required to follow. The first was rhyme, e.g., table (rhyme) could have an answer of ‘label, stable, able’ etc, the second was adjective where the participant was required to make a note of a word which was used to describe the noun they were presented with, e.g., tree (adjective) where the answer could be ‘tall, leafy, green’ etc and the last instruction was capitals where they were asked to write ‘yes’ if the word presented to them was in capitals and the word ‘no’ if the presented word was not in capitals, e.g., DOOR (capitals) the answer would be ‘yes’ and ‘no’ if the word was door (capitals).

Procedure

The participants were presented with a list of word followed by an instruction of which there were three different kinds. These instructions were in brackets next to the word and the first of these instructions was rhyme. The participants were requested to write a word that corresponds correctly with the instruction next to word presented to the. The participants were presented each word with a gap of approximately 5-8 second between them to allow for time to record down their response according to the instruction in the brackets. In the second part of the experiment, participants were requested to write down on a new sheet of paper as many original words as they could recall in any order over the period of approximately 5 minutes. The participants were then requested to score the list of words they had recalled by writing either R, C or A next to the word in accordance to the relevant group then add up the number of R’s, C’s and A’s they got and record them for data input.

Results

The ANOVA was used to obtain these results as the experiment was a repeat measures experiment, there were 3 conditions present and the data was parametric. A post hoc test was used because a directional hypothesis was predicted.

Table 1: Descriptive statistics for the recollection of words at deeper levels of processing.

The above mean results indicate a significantly large difference between the graphemic and semantic words in line with the direction of the predicted hypothesis.

Figure 1: A line graph showing the results of the experiment conducted to see if deeper levels of processing resulted in better recall of words.

The line graph clearly indicated that the direction of the results was in line with the predicted hypothesis.

The repeat measures ANOVA revealed a significant result showing that there was a significant difference between the 3 conditions at the level: p<.001, F(2, 108) = 57.46. The Bonferoni post hoc test was carried out because a directional hypothesis was predicted. This revealed a mean difference between graphemic and phonemic words of 1.69, phonemic and semantic of 1.56 and graphemic and semantic of 3.26, all at a significance level of .001

Discussion

The H1: Deeper levels of processes will result in better recall of words for this experiment was accepted as the results obtained indicated a distinct significance level. They show that deeper levels of processing did result in better recollection of words. Therefore, the null hypothesis was rejected for this experiment. The significance was clearly illustrated in figure one and in the ANOVA and post hoc test results which is further confirm the significance level at the .001 level. The descriptive statistics for the experiment shows that there was a large difference between the means of graphemic and semantic conditions.

It can be said that the results of this experiment are in line with and support the findings of Elias & Perfetti (1973). However, the results are inconsistent with Hyde & Jenkins (1973) study in which they found that participants of the incidental task recalled the same amount as the intentional task participants. This experiment also fails to take into consideration the findings of Tyler et al (1979), who believed that the retention of information is due to processing effort and not the depth of processing. In support of Tyler’s study it can be said that participants, on average do spend a longer period of time processing the more difficult tasks that they are presented with As a result of this it can therefore be said that the results obtained are party down to more time being spent on the task. Also, as the experiment was not counterbalanced it can be said that this may have also had an effect on the participant’s recollection. The type of processing, the amount of effort & the length of time spent on processing can be confounded and therefore, deeper processing occurs with more effort and time and so it is difficult to know which factor influences the results. Alongside this, it’s often difficult with many of the tasks used in levels of processing studies to be sure what the level of processing actually is. For example, in the study by Hyde & Jenkins, it was understood that a word’s frequency involved thinking about its meaning, but it is not clear as to why this is so. Also, they argued that the task of deciding the part of speech to which a word belongs is a shallow processing task but other researchers claim that the task involves deep or semantic processing. So, a major problem is the lack of any independent measure of processing depth. Another objection is that levels of processing theory do not really explain why deeper levels of processing are more effective. Eysenck (1990) claimed that it describes rather than explains what is happening. However, after the publication of recent studies, this point has been clarified. It can be said that deeper coding produces better retention as it is more elaborate. Elaborative encoding enriches the memory representation of an item by stimulating many aspects of the words meaning and linking it into the pre-existing group of semantic associations. Deep level semantic coding is more than likely to be elaborated than shallow physical coding and this may be the reason of its better function.

There are a few improvements that can be made to the experimental design; the first of which would be the participants. Within this experiment, there were a predominantly large number of female participants in comparison to males. An alteration that could be made would be to include an equal number of male to female participants. The environment in which the participants were seated was not secure as they had the ability to cheat by looking over to the participant next to them. The experiment also did not take into account the any learning disability such as dyslexia. The experiment is also strongly biased towards the use of undergraduate psychology students only in a repeat measures design which may have given them more practises at recalling the words. A possible improvement could be to include participants from the wider population and use an independent groups design to avoid them from familiarising themselves with the words.

The theory of levels of processing puts forward the claim that shallow processing occurs at the early stages, and that information is processed more deeply as it passes on through the system: the more deeply information has been processed the more likely it is to be remembered.

References

Cole, A., (2006), The Oxford Dictionary of Psychology. Oxford University Press: Oxford.

Craik, F. I. M., & Lockhart, R. S. (1972). Levels of processing: A framework for memory research. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behaviour, 11, 671-684.

Davey, G. et al. (2004), Complete Psychology. Hodder Headline: London .

Eysenck, M.W., (2004), Psychology: An International Perspective. Psychology Press: New York.

Field, A., (2005), Discovering Statistics Using SPSS. 2nd Ed. Sage Publications: London.

Hewstone, M. et al. (2005), Psychology. Alden Press: Oxford, UK.

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