Long-Term Memory

This time, my guinea pigs are one Asian male and one Asian female. Both of them asked to see the list after the immediate recall to check what they have missed. I think this would affect their performance of the delayed recall.

First, we could obviously see the decay of the long-term memory. However, the delayed recall was not very different from the immediate recall. I was surprised that their performance was better than Ebbinghaus’ forgetting curve (1 hour later, the saving rate would drop to 42% or 43 %).

It is interesting to see that in the immediate recall, the male started from the end of the list and the female could mostly follow the original sequence for the first five words, and then kept on the words that could be chunked together (such as wood & green, bottle & jogging).

For the male, he said he tried to use memorize them alphabetically, but mostly he did not use specific strategy(maintenance rehearsal). For the female, she also tried to memorize the first letter and also picture imagines(visual imagery), and make connection between words (more elaborative rehearsal). Therefore, the mnemonic did help her memorize better.

Second, the male participant recalled from the end of the list when recalling immediately (recency effect). Interestingly, he started from the beginning of the list when recalling again after one hour. However, the female participant still recalled from the beginning of the list. One of the confounding variables is that they were able to revisit the list from the immediate recall. This explained why they can remember words after one hour that they did not in the immediate recall.

It would be interesting to study the difference between male's and female's memory.