The Rumor Chain

A QANTAS International 747 that was going to Los Angeles took off from Bangkok International Airport. A passenger near the rear of the aircraft announced that he was hijacking for the People’s Revolutionary Army.
The hijacker then held a 357 Magnum gun to the head of Jack Straw, a flight attendant, and forced him to open the cockpit floor. There the hijacker held the gun at the head of the pilot, Jane Smith, and forced her to change course to Cuba. While the pilot radioed Bangkok to report the situation she suddenly threw the microphone at the hijacker who fell backwards though the open cockpit door and onto the floor.
The angry passengers forced the gun off him and tied him up. The place returned to Bangkok and in a few minutes the hijacker was arrested.

Today’s second experiment is called “The Rumor Chain”. Firstly, Mr. Anthony asked for three volunteers, and asked two of them to go out of the room. Then, he started reading a story of hijacking a plane. The volunteer that was not asked to leave the room had to listen to the story and retell it to the other two volunteers. Each time the story is retold, some information has been lost. However, the first and the last part of the story tend to be very well remembered, as well as the other elements of the story which sounds distinctive such as the Magnum 357.

From the experiment, we can see the following:

Leveling: simplifying material ...We can see that as the story is being told more and more, it gets shorter and shorter. This happens because the person tend to forget the non-important details of the story.

Sharpening: highlight or overemphasizing some material which the person think is important

Assimilation: changing details to better fit the subjects own background or knowledge (schemas)
Eg. Gender of pilot and flight attendant

All Purpose Memory

Today’s activity is called “all purpose memory activity”. Mr. Anthony read out several words, and we have to remember them. The words said are the following: Bed, Quilt, Dark, Silence, Fatigue, Clock, Snoring, Night, Toss, Tired, Artichoke, Turn, Rest, and Dream. After plotting the result in the graph, we can see that pattern that people tend to remember the first and last words better than the middle ones. This shows the effectiveness of the serial position effect which states that we tend to remember the primary and recency of the list. Furthermore, we tend to remember words which sounds more fancy (semantic distinctiveness) that the others such as the words fatigue and artichoke. Rehearsal is another factor that can enhance our memory. In this experiment, the word “night” was said 3 times, and ten out of ten people remembered it. On the other hand, we can also make up the word that was not on the list because of our schema (memory reconstruction). In this experiment, the word “sleep” was not said out. However, three people had it on their list – showing their imagination of the schema of the bedroom. Lastly, chunking is another technique that might be able to enhance our memory, but in this experiment it didn’t work quite well. Since the participants are not native English speakers, so they are not used to the words Toss and Turn. This causes the results to not be as Mr. Anthony had expected.

Meaning Enhances Recall

The third experiment was called “meaning enhances recall”, determining the capacity of our long term memory. Firstly, we have to listen to a set of words, which are divided into two subgroups. We have to mentally count the syllable of the word labeled with A, and categorized if the word is pleasant or unpleasant if it is labeled B. As the result of our experiment, the highest score for A was 10, and the lowest was 1. The highest for B was 9 and lowest was 2. The highest total was 19, and the lowest total was 6. The produced the average of 5.09 for A, 7.09 for B, and 12.27 in total. From this we can see that we tend to recall more word that we have attached meaning to it (B) than the one that we didn’t (A). However, the result of two participants of the experiment didn’t follow the occurred trend. After all the experiment is done, Pox, participant who got the highest, told us that he used the method of telling meaningful stories (effortful processing) to himself while listening to those words. From this, we can see that the more meaningful the memories are, the easier it is to be recalled.

Short Term Memory

In today’s class, Mr. Anthony conducted the experiment to determine the capacity of our short term memories. Firstly, he read out series of numbers in an ascending amount of digits. Each time each series was read out, each student have to try to recall and write it down. After doing this, I can remember only up to 6 digits series of number, whereas the average of the class is 6.5 digits. The literature value of human’s short term memory is 7 ± 2. This shows that the capacity our class is below the normal average. From this experiment, we can see that we tend to remember the first and last part of the information and tend to forget the middle ones. This is because we focused too much in remembering the first couples of digits and tend to forget to remember the upcoming ones. However, we also tend to focus more remember the last part of the information causing interference with the earlier parts of our memories. To improve our short term memory, we should try to visualize the information, remember the pattern, or use "chunking" - grouping into sets of 3 numbers. However, in this experiment number is very difficult to be visualized. Therefore, chunking seems to be the only way that works with this experiment.

My First Memory

Mr. Anthony lets each of us recall our first memory. Each of the class members need to come up with what they think is their first memory, their age at that time, and their emotions. I recalled the memory of walking back home from a pre-school with my nanny. I remembered it as a sad memory since I need to walk for quite a long distance under the hot sun. After all my classmates report their first memory, we can see from the results that our first memories are constructed around the age of 3-4 years at average. But actually, what we really came up might not really be our first memory since we are neurologically capable to remember things at the age of 5. What we came up with would just be a reconstruction of several events (what you experienced or been told by your family) that we have strong emotional elements attached to it. This shows that our memories are very malleable. What we remember would be a picture of us looking back at ourselves, but not exactly the same since they are not videotaped.

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