Our Memories are Broken down into two Components short-term Memory and long-term Memories: Quantitative Research in Psychology (QTRP) Report, KU, Singapore

Our memories are broken down into two components – short-term memory and long-term memories. The short-term memory store holds information temporarily (e.g., a mobile phone number) and has a limited capacity, whereas long-term memory stores have an infinite capacity and can hold memories from many years back.

Atkinson and Shiffrin’s (1968) theory of memory suggests that rehearsal moves short-term memories into long-term stores. Past experiments suggest a primary and recency effect, where participants are able to remember the words at the start of the list and the end, respectively.

They remember words at the start due to rehearsal while the words at the end of recalled first. Words in the middle of the list are not recalled as much because the short-term store has been filled up. The current study is looking at the serial position effect in short-term memory and we are replicating past experiments in this field.

Please ensure that you have your writing materials and paper before the start of the experiment. The lecturer will read out 4 lists of 12 words and say “go”. Thereafter, you will need to write down the words in any order.

After all the lists are presented, you will need to identify the position of each word that you got correct, record your results in the data collection sheet and submit it to your lecturer.

Your lecturer will collate the results for the whole class and provide you the data in an excel file.

In your lab report, you will need to provide the means and standard deviations of the recall rate for each position in the serial curve (i.e. position 1 to 12) and present a line graph (similar to that above) to accompany your results.