Chapter 1. Levels of Processing
1.1 Introduction
Levels of Processing
Understanding how reading works plays an important role in understanding how memory is processed and stored. In this experiment, you will examine different facets of reading a word. Reading a word has many features: processing the physical stimulus, hearing the word in your head, and processing the meaning of the word. These are separate acts, and you will be engaging in different tasks to measure how quickly and accurately you process each of these aspects of reading a word.
1.2 Experiment Setup
1.3 Instructions
Instructions
We will be examining your responses to words. You will need to press the space bar to begin the experiment. At the beginning of each trial, a fixation mark will appear. Please look at this mark. After it is removed, you will be presented with a question. The question will be about the word to follow and can be answered unambiguously with either a Yes or a No.
When you have read the question, press the space bar, and the question will be removed and the word presented for a brief period. You are to answer Yes or No to the question using either the keys indicated below or the buttons on the screen.
Keyboard Responses
| Key | What Response Means |
|---|---|
| Z | Yes |
| / | No |
1.4 Experiment
Begin Experiment
1.5 Results
Results
1.6 Debriefing
Debriefing
As mentioned in the results, Craik and Lockhart (1972) and Craik and Tulving (1975) used an incidental learning task because they wanted to clearly study how we process a word to see how that would impact our memory for that word. If you know you are going to have to recall a word, you will engage in some sort of activity, such as repeating the word or putting the word into a sentence, to help you recall the word. You are a student; you have a long list of behaviors that are called rehearsal that help you remember items you are studying. Before these studies, researchers thought that the important factor in storing an item in memory was moving it to the proper storage, long-term memory (Craik, 2011). Once an item is in long-term memory, it is stored. By using incidental learning, Craik and colleague kept their participants from engaging in rehearsal. Thus, by asking the participants to engage in different tasks with the word, e.g., to identify its case, or to determine whether the word fits a sentence, they controlled how the participant interacted with the word. As was seen in the results, and as Craik found, you do not remember words very well if you only identify the case. You do okay if you are asked if one word rhymes with another word. You do very well if you are asked whether the word fits the meaning of a sentence. In this experiment, what determined how well you remembered an item was how you cognitively processed the item. Only determining the case did not lead you to process the items very much as you, as a result, did not recall it very well. All you needed was to see the case of the letters. You did not even need to read the word. To determine if a word fit the meaning of a sentence, you had to read the word and determine what the word means. That more complex processing allowed you, even when you were not planning it, to remember the word. Craik and his colleagues called this the depth of processing. So memory depends upon the depth of processing and not the movement of items through memory stores (Craik, 2011).
References:
Craik, F. I. M. & Lockhart, R. S. (1972). Levels of processing: A framework for memory research. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 11, 671-684.
Craik, F. I. M., & Tulving, E. (1975). Depth of processing and the retention of words in episodic memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 104, 268–294.
Craik, F. M. (2011). Levels of processing in human memory. In M. Gernsbacher, R. W. Pew, L. M. Hough, J. R. Pomerantz (Eds.), Psychology and the real world: Essays illustrating fundamental contributions to society (pp. 76-82). New York, NY US: Worth Publishers.
1.7 Quiz
Quiz