Long-term Memory Test

The recalled items are the bolded ones displayed below.

Immediate Recall: Paper, Seat, Tire, Love, Beach, Analysis, conjunction, brush, chairman, accurate, woods, green, hunger, gift, keyboard, number, bottle, jogging, wheel, system.

Delayed Recall: One hour later
Paper, Seat, Tire, Love, Beach, Analysis, conjunction, brush, chairman, accurate, woods, green, hunger, gift, keyboard, number, bottle, jogging, wheel, system.

Delayed Recall: Three hours later
Paper, Seat, Tire, Love, Beach, Analysis, conjunction, brush, chairman, accurate, woods, green, hunger, gift, keyboard, number, bottle, jogging, wheel, system.

1. Relate this test to Ebbinghaus’ research on “forgetting”

In my test, I read a list of 20 words to my subject with a constant interval of 10 seconds between each word and then asked him to recall the words immediately, one hour later as well as three hours later. In the process I did not inform my subject that he would be tested again in an hour or in three hour time. Therefore this memory test is somewhat similar to Ebbinghaus’ relearning task, “in which a list is originally learned, set aside for some period of time, then later relearned to the same criterion of accuracy” (Ashcraft, 1989: 199). The difference between this memory test and Ebbinghaus’ experimental procedures is that Ebbinghaus insisted using “meaningless stimulus” whereas the words in this memory test are some words with meanings.

The test results are: the subject could recall 15 words immediately after learning the word list, however he could only recall 12 and 11 words one hour and three hours later respectively. Such result is also somewhat in line with Ebbinghaus’ research finding of the“forgetting curve”: the most dramatic forgetting happens in the early phase after original learning (Ashcraft, 1989), because my subject’s performance decreased faster immediately after original learning. The test results also showed the decay theory, because my subject’s “memory traces simply decay in strength with time” (Anderson, 2005: 209).

2. How did my subject try to memorize the words in this test?
I interviewed my subject after the test. As (Ashcraft, 1989) pointed out, subjects in the memory tests would actively employ all kinds of mnemonic devices spontaneously and actually my subject adopted strategies of rehearsal, organization and imagery to assist his storage of information.

Type II rehearsal:
My subject mentioned to me that he used the meanings of the words to construct sentences to help him store the information. For example, for the first five words, he memorized them in the sentence of “A tired (tire) man is sitting (seat) on the beach while reading a love story in the newspaper (paper)”.

Chunking and subjective organization:
My subject mentioned to me that he decided to divide the 20 words into four chunks when he was going to take this memory test. He also actively reorganized the words into chunks along the memory test. For example, he grouped “woods” and “green” together because he thought green is the characteristic of woods. He also grouped “analysis” and “system”, because his job is related to networked system analysis.

Imagery
My subject meanwhile used visual imagery in this test. He mentioned to me that he tried to memorize the last couple of words in the word list by visualizing them in the following picture: he is finding the street "number" of a gym. After entering the gym, he jogs ("jogging") on a treadmill and rides a bicycle("wheel").