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.