Psychology experiment I am investigating Chunking and the effect it has on the Short Term Memory

Natalie Headland

Introduction

Background Research

I am investigating Chunking and the effect it has on the Short Term Memory. Chunking is where individual letters represent individual pieces of information and each of the letter’s fills a slot. The letters composing a word are chunked into one unit, and each unit fills one slot. Miller discovered the magic number seven and a model of memory where 7 + 2 units of information (regardless of the type of data) can be simultaneously held.

Miller and Selfridge did an experiment that is similar to mine. They gave participants ‘sentences’ in varying lengths that resembled (or approx. to) true English to different degrees and asked them to recall the words in their correct order. The closer the sentence was to approx. English the better it was recalled. This suggests that knowledge of semantic and grammatical structure is used to aid recall from the STM.

This is similar to my investigation except that I’m using grouped and ungrouped letters instead of sentences.

Rationale

The main focus of my research is to find out whether the capacity of the STM can be improved by using chunking.

My research is an adaptation of a study by Miller and Selfridge, in their study they gave participants sentences of varying lengths, where I’ve used grouped and ungrouped letters instead of sentences.

My aim is to find out whether chunking can help improve recall in the STM.

Hypothesis(es)

Experimental Hypothesis – In a memory test, participants will recall more letters that have been presented in meaningful chunks, compared to letters not ...