Demonstration 2: Short-Term Memory

Another demonstration on short-term memory we had in class is the remembering of words. Mr. Anthony said word after word out loud, and after he was done, we had to write the words we remembered down.

After the data was collected, we could tell from the graph that people in the class tended to remember words that appear in the beginning and at the end of the sequence and that they tended to forget words in the middle. This data proves the serial position effect, which states that people remember better in the beginning and at the end.

The word that got recalled the most was night, and the reason was that it was repeated in the sequence by Mr. Anthony; this shows that repetition improves the remembering of the information. Another word that got recalled often was pineapple. The sequence of words was related to sleep and night; therefore, when the word, pineapple, was said, it was not related; it shows distinctiveness, which makes us remember it more.

Another two words that are not related to the sequence were toss and turn, but some classmates were able to recall it. They used chunking to relate those two words together to make them remember the words.

The numbers of correct responses were also collected, and the mean (average) number of words recalled is 7, which is the capacity of a human’s short-term memory.

Some people in the class, including myself, recalled hearing the word, sleep, although it was not said. Mr. Anthony explained this phenomenon by saying that people were relating the words being said such as night, dark, and bed to sleep; therefore they constructed a false memory of hearing the actual word. This shows how our memory can be malleable.