Craik and Lockhart believed that depth is a critical concept for levels of processing theory.

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Depth of Analysis

Craik and Lockhart believed that depth is a critical concept for levels of processing theory.

  • The depth of processing of a stimulus has a substantial effect on its memorability, i.e. how well it is remembered.
  • Deeper levels of analysis produce more elaborate, longer lasting and stronger memory traces than do shallow levels of analysis.

Craik (1973) defined depth as “the meaningfulness extracted from the stimulus rather than in terms of the number of analyses performed upon it”. Rehearsal or repetition is not a form of deep processing because it only involves a repeated “number of analyses”, and not and extraction of meaningfulness.

Craik and Tulving used semantic processing to represent deep processing and the physical analysis to represent shallower processing. As the theory would predict, participants remembered those words that were deeply processed better than those processed shallowly. The findings of Hyde and Jenkins (1973) also support this theory.

Elaboration

Craik and Tulving’s study also looked at how the elaboration of processing can lead to a greater recall. In a further experiment, the participants were presented on each trial with a word and a sentence containing a blank. They were then asked to decide whether the word fitted into the uncompleted question. Recall was twice as high for words accompanying complex sentences, suggesting that elaboration benefits long term memory. There is a difference between elaboration as in the complexity of the sentence, and the time spent on the task, as in the phonemic processing. Depth of processing involves elaboration.

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Organization 

Organization is another form of deep processing. Research has shown that organization creates a lasting memory like semantic processing. It is implicit rather than explicit memory and no conscious processing needs to take place. Mandler (1967) conducted and experiment in which he gave participants a pack of 52 picture cards, each of which had a word printed on it. Participants were then asked to sort the cards into piles, using anything from two to seven categories, and could go by any system the wished. They were then asked to carry on with the sorting until they came ...

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Summary This is a very detailed piece of work which shows the writer fully understands the subject matter. The experiments are explained well and most of the relevant ones on this subject have been included. If the essay was better organised this piece of work would probably get full marks. Score 4*