Chapter 1. Rehearsal Functions

1.1 Introduction

Cognitive Tool Kit

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Rehearsal Functions

Bousfield, Cohen, and Whitmarsh replicated and extended George Miller’s classic paper "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two” by demonstrating that rehearsal influences short-term memory capacity. The purpose of the present experiment is to examine the effectiveness of a particular rehearsal strategy.

1.2 Experiment Setup

1.3 Instructions

Instructions

Press the space bar to begin the experiment. At the beginning of the first trial, a fixation mark will appear. Please focus on 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.

1.4 Experiment

Begin Experiment

1.5 Results

Results

1.6 Debriefing

Debriefing

The results of this study demonstrate that short-term memory capacity is influenced by rehearsal strategies. The strategy examined here, clustering, is an elaborative rehearsal strategy. Elaborative rehearsal has been shown to facilitate the transfer of information from short-term to long-term memory storage. Clustering involves the forming of associations between related items. This association between items may be useful if one item may be an effective cue for a related item, leading to better retrieval of the associated or clustered items. It is important to note that recent research by Cowan (2001) has demonstrated that most people can remember from 4 to 7 items and that an “item” in memory can be a cluster of related items. Thus, clustering by associating related items is an effective strategy for increasing short-term memory capacity and improving likelihood of transfer to long-term storage.

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.

Cowan, N. (2001). The magical number 4 in short-term memory: A reconsideration of mental storage capacity. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24(1), 87-114.

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, andCognition,4, 273-279.

1.7 Quiz

Quiz

Question 1.1

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.