Student Research Report: Can You Remember?
In Fall 2021, students in Dr. Emily Stark’s Research Methods and Design course completed multiple hands-on data collection projects. They were also assigned a blog paper where they discussed one of the topics they chose to research and explained their findings to a general audience. The goal of this assignment was to give students an opportunity to explore a different form of writing from APA-style research papers. Some of these blog papers will be featured here throughout the spring to showcase the students’ findings. Please feel free to contact Dr. Stark through the contact form on this site for additional information about this course or the assignments used.
By Halley Weinberger
Do you ever find yourself struggling to remember something? You know there was one more item you needed at the grocery store. If only you could put your finger on it! You are not the only one who struggles to remember things. Some psychologists are interested in diving deeper into how people remember things and how many items they can remember. Thalmann, Souza, and Oberauer (2019) discuss a study in which they tested a group of college students to try and predict if words presented with other similar words would be remembered better than words presented alone. The study found that words presented with other similar words were remembered better than words presented alone. Along with this, the study showed that the number of words a person could remember increased when words were presented in similar groups. Norris et al. (2020) also studied how people can best remember items, finding that words presented in pairs were remembered better than words presented alone.
One of the factors that could contribute to the number of words people can remember is if words are presented in groups of similar words. Although this is not always accurate, many people tend to remember words that can be grouped into overall categories. As someone who frequently makes mental lists of the things that I need to do, I wanted to know if people could remember more information if specific words were presented in a group of similar words over a group of unsimilar words. For my experiment project in PSYC 211W Research Methods and Design, I wanted to design an experiment that would examine this. Along with groups of words, I wanted to know if gender influenced the number of words a person remembered.
To explore these questions, I decided to meet with people and see how many words they could remember. I came up with a list of 20 words that were similar to one another, with words like “football, baseball, and soccer.” I also generated a second list of 20 words that were very different from one another, with words like “house, friend, and planner.” Then, I met with participants individually in a quiet space. I read one of the lists out loud, each person listening to either the similar list of words or the un-similar list of words. After I finished reading the words out loud, the person repeated all of the words they could remember from the list. I recorded the number of words they remembered correctly until they said they could not remember anything else. I did this with 16 people, half being men and the other half being women.
After recording the number of words that 16 different people could remember, I ran statistical tests. Ultimately, my results showed that the gender of the participant did not have a significant effect on the number of words that people remembered, and that the group of words that items were presented in did not significantly affect the number of words a person could remember. Additionally, the gender of the participant did not impact the number of words remembered differently between if the words were grouped or not grouped.
Although these results may not seem interesting, it is significant to note that my experiment had limitations. I was only able to collect information from 16 people, but if the same experiment was conducted with more people, we may see a significant impact of the number of words a person can remember based on if the words are presented with similar or unsimilar groups of words. Future studies might choose to examine the number of groups of words that people can remember, or how many words help people effectively remember words in a group. The next time you go to the grocery store or start to write your to-do list, pay attention to what you remember! Was it the simple items? The similar items? The items that were the same color? I think if you take the time to ask and answer these questions, you may uncover a new understanding of how you best remember the items on your to-do list.
References
Norris, D., Kalm, K., & Hall, J. (2020). Chunking and redintegration in verbal short-term memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 46(5), 872-893. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xlm0000762
Thalmann, M., Souza, A. S., & Oberauer, K. (2019). How does chunking help working memory? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 45(1), 37-55. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xlm0000578