Memory

Introduction

Memory is in itself a gigantic field, depending on whether one wishes to test the subject's ability to recall learned information, past events in ones personal life, or random chains of numbers. Furthermore, not only the information, but also the manner in which it is presented, is certainly relevant to any discussion of this construct. While I do not hope in this study to test the construct of memory per se, I do hope to arrive at some meaningful conclusions as to whether or not individuals tend to be better at recalling abstract or concrete terms via the short-term memory. I well also like to investigate whether gender affects one's ability to recall these terms. Finally, I intend to empirically test whether or not an oral or visual means of presenting these terms affects the subjects' recall ability.

Within cognitive psychology, the concept of working memory represents a modification and extension of an earlier concept, short-term memory, a limited-capacity temporary memory store, characterized by the model proposed by Atkinson and Shiffrin. The concept of working memory differs from that of short-term memory in two respects: it is assumed to involve a number of subsystems, rather than a unitary module; and there is considerable emphasis on its functional role in other cognitive tasks such as learning, reasoning, and comprehension. (Atkinson, R C.; Shiffrin, R M.).

The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: is a 1956 paper by the cognitive psychologist George A. Miller. In it Miller showed a number of remarkable coincidences between the channel capacity of a number of human cognitive and perceptual tasks. In each case, the effective channel capacity is equivalent to between 5 and 9 equally-weighted error-less choices: on average, about 2.5 bits of information. Miller hypothesized that these may all be due to some common but unknown underlying mechanism.

In his paper The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information, which is summarized in Sternber (1977), George Miller states that the immediate memory of people can hold about seven items at a time. After referring to some experiments performed by other psychologist, he concludes that the span of absoult judgment (such as reporting how many dots are flashed on a screen), and the span of immediate memory (such as remembering a list of numbers) are all seven plus or minus two items. This has important consequences for my research. It would mean that I should make lists of abstract and concrete words that are longer than seven word each, in order to make sure that all perticipants are using their shor-term memory to the maxium capacity. However lists of nine words are not sufficient either, a Miller's paper would suggest, because of a trick that most people use to be able to remember more than seven items at a time. (Steingberg, R.J.) This is know as clustering, the compiling of separate items in the head to form one item, which can then be remembered. The item "grape" and the item "strawberry", for example can be joined together to form one item "fruit", consisting of two sub items. In order to overcome this effect of clustering, but still make sure that the list of words are not too long, the ideal number of words in a list would be around fifteen.

The construct I'm looking in this study is the difference in retention span of the different participants. The dependent variable are the number of abstract and concrete words that the participants remember. The difference between these two values is the variable I used for my analysis. The independent variavbles are all the other factors that I'm interested in, most importantly type of word, but also gender, method and order of presentation.

Hypotheses

Hypothesis 1: My most important hypothese is that concrete words are remembered more easily that abstract words.

Rationale: The concrete concepts (i.e. the meanings of those words) are more easily visualized and clustered than the abstract ones. For example: it is easier to remember Eliphant and Lake than Chance and Socialism, because a person can mentally visualize a Eliphant and a Lake and one can "add" them into a picture, e.g. a eliphant jumping into a lake.

Hypothesis 2: An additional hypothesis is that I expect my perticipants to be better at remembering words that are presented to them visually rather thatn orally.

Rationale: Reading works tends to be a more active process than merely listening to them, and because in general, people are more used to remembering written lists of words than spoken listd of words (think of shopping lists, for instance) Futhermore, the words have to be written down, which is a visual process as well; when the words are presented visually, therefore, the participants can stick to the same medium.

Hypothesis 3: I expect my participants to be better at remembering the second list of words.

Rationale: Also the order of the lists of words, that is to say, first presenting the participants with concrete words and than with abstract words, or vice versa, plays a role. They have had the experience of having to remember words at least once (namely, during the first list), so they could have thought of some trick to remember them. This is called the learner effect.

My last variable is gender, this will only cause a general effect. Females are generally thought