George Miller’s article “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two” is a classic in the field of memory research. It was the first to clearly identify the size of short-term memory. As the title implies, your short-term memory can hold approximately seven items. A good deal of empirical research is summarized in this review article. The Bousfield, Cohen, and Whitmarsh study has been chosen to represent the work done on this phenomenon. Despite the fact that it was published slightly after Miller’s article, it clearly demonstrates the importance of memory rehearsal functions in short-term memory ability. The particular rehearsal function studied in this work is clustering. Clustering is the rehearsal function that deals with categorization of items to increase short-term memory capacity.
References:
Bousfield, W. W., Cohen, B. H., & Whitmarsh, G. A. (1958). Associative clustering in the recall of words of different taxonomic frequencies of occurrence. Psychological Reports, 4, 39-44.
Miller, G. A. (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two: some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review, 63, 81-97.
Beatty, W. W., Testa, J. A., English, S., & Winn, P. (1997). Influences of clustering and switching on the verbal fluency performance of patients with Alzheimer’s disease. Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition, 4, 273-279.
1.2Experiment Setup
1.3Instructions
Instructions
You will need to press the space bar to begin the experiment. At the beginning of the first trial, a fixation mark will appear. Please look at this mark. After it is removed, a list of 40 words will appear on the screen, one at a time. Your task is to view the words as they are presented. Your recall for these words will be tested after all of the words have been presented.
1.4Experiment
Begin Experiment
Start Experiment
1.5Results
Results
1.6Quiz
Quiz
Question
1.1
1. Which of the following is the independent variable in this experiment?
A.
B.
C.
D.
1
Incorrect.
Correct.
The independent variable is the variable that is manipulated by the experimenter in order to determine whether it has a cause-and-effect relationship with the dependent variable (i.e., the variable the experimenter measures). In this experiment, the independent variable was the frequency of exposure to items in each category.
Question
1.2
2. Which of the following is the dependent variable in this experiment?
A.
B.
C.
D.
1
Correct.
Incorrect.
The dependent variable is the variable that the experimenter measures, otherwise known as the data. In this experiment the dependent variable was recall performance.
Question
1.3
3. The results of the 1958 study by Bousfield and colleagues can best be described in which of the following ways?
A.
B.
C.
D.
1
Correct.
Incorrect.
Bousfield and colleagues (1958) found that rehearsal functions like clustering are particularly effective with familiar information. The word lists in their experiment that contained high-frequency words (ones that were determined in a previous study to be often reported as examples of particular categories) were recalled more frequently than low-frequency words.
Question
1.4
4. Which researcher is credited with determining the size of short-term memory (7, + or – 2)?
A.
B.
C.
D.
Correct.
Incorrect.
Miller (1956) is well known for his review article “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two,” which summarized the work done up until that point on the size of short-term memory.
Question
1.5
5. What measure did Bousfield, et al, use to indicate the amount of clustering that occurred in participants’ responses during their experiment?
A.
B.
C.
D.
Correct.
Incorrect.
Bousfield, et al (1958), used the summary term ratio of repetition to determine how well participants were able to cluster words in the presented list into categories. It was calculated as follows: the number of repetitions of words belonging in the same category divided by the total words recalled, minus 1.
