Hypothesis 1 - Participants will have a higher recall in the cued recall condition rather than the free recall condition

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Introduction

“The ability to process and retrieve information is known as memory”. The most influential explanation of memory is Atkinson’s and Shiffrin’s models of memory. This theory suggests that there are separate memory stores, short term memory (STM) and long term memory (LTM). The basis of the STM store is acoustic where information is processed acoustically, in contrast the LTM store processes information on the basis of the meaning of the material. In other words, meaningless items are incapable of being stored for long durations by the LTM. This idea of separate memory stores has been investigated on several occasions and findings do seem to be consistent.

However although this explanation does seem to be empirically supported, most of this evidence were derived from studies where participants were tested under highly artificial conditions. However in every day life memory processes come to us naturally, for this reason the environment we’re expected to recall in, is important and thus affects findings.

An alternative approach therefore is to emphasize the role of established information as an aid to integrating new information. Bransford and Johnson’s assessment of people’s recall for a particular piece of text shows a clear link between understanding and memory. Thus we “remember material which we understand and we understand material which we remember”.

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Craik and Lockhart (1972) put forward an alternative explanation to Atkinson’s and Shiffrin’s model of memory. Craik and Lockhart claimed that there are different levels of processing which determine how well the stimulus material is recalled. The first level of processing is at the ‘shallow level’ where the surface features of a stimulus are analysed superficially. The second level of processing is at the ‘phonemic level’ where a verbal stimulus is analysed according to its sound. The third level of processing is at a ‘deep level’ where the semantic features of a stimulus are analysed more extensively. Therefore the ...

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