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.