Psychology 403.
Laboratory in Cognitive Psychology
Experiment 6.
Fall, 2003
Organization in Memory
Overview
Participants are successively presented four lists of words to memorize and then asked to
recall as many of the words as possible. The procedure is repeated again and a second test
given. Two groups of participants differ in that they receive different lists. One receives lists that
are organized hierarchically into categories and subcategories and then exemplars of each
subcategory. The other receives lists of the same words but scrambled so that they are no longer
hierarchically organized.
The processes by which information is encoded in memory during a study period and then
subsequently recalled have been studied extensively by cognitive psychologists. This experiment
will focus primarily on the effects of the organization of the material to be remembered, and
secondarily on the effects of additional study time. In this experiment, participants will study lists
of words and then attempt to recall them. The words will either be hierarchically organized or
haphazardly arranged lists. In the organized condition the words are organized into categories
and subcategories, with several exemplars of each subcategory. In the unorganized condition
the same words will be scrambled rather than organized. There are at least two different ways in
which the organization could impact the efficiency of memorizing and recalling the words. One is
at the time that the words are being memorized. The organization could influence the way that the
material is stored in memory. Associationistic theories of memory usually suggest that material
that is stored in memory is interconnected, based on many factors that might include their cooccurrence at the time of learning and, more importantly, the interrelatedness of the material that
is learned. Related items are interconnected in memory so that recall of one item activates the
representation of related items. The hierarchical organization could also impact recall. With
organized materials, recall of the category names could serve as a retrieval cue to activate the
representations of the category members so that they are more readily recalled.
The effect of an additional opportunity to relearn the words will be evaluated by providing
participants with two successive opportunities to study and then recall the stimulus word lists.
They will study the same 104 words in each of two blocks, and take a separate recall test after
each study period. Although there are many, many factors known to influence the rate of
improvement with additional learning opportunities, this manipulation has not been designed to
test any particular hypothesis. It is included primarily so that this experiment illustrates the use of
a mixed experimental design.
Method
This experiment will be carried out using paper and pencil. Each participant will receive a
booklet containing the instructions, the lists to be studied, and pages on which to write down the
recalled items. In addition, at the end of the packet are scoring sheets so that the participants can
score their own recall data. The experiment will be carried out in two blocks. In each block the
participant will study each of four lists of 26 words in succession for one minute each, turning the
page from list to list when instructed by the instructor, who will time the experiment using a
stopwatch. After successively studying four lists, the participant will be given five minutes to write
down as many items as they can recall from the preceding four lists. Following the recall period,
the procedure will be repeated with the same four lists, but presented in reverse order. Another
five-minute recall test will follow.2
The word lists will be in two forms, organized or unorganized. The organized lists will
each consist of 26 words, arranged so that there is a general category, two subcategories, and
five sub-subcategories, with three or four words under each of the lowest level categories. The
category names (at all levels) will be capitalized. The unorganized lists are created from the same
set of 104 words, randomly assigning 26 words to each list, and randomly assigning words to the
"category" levels, and printing them in capital letters, but with no systematic semantic relationships
among words in individual categories as in the organized lists. Participants will be assigned
haphazardly to conditions (determined by the order in which the test booklets are passed out).
At the end of the experiment, participants will compare the words that they wrote down in
the recall tests to an alphabetized list of the words. They will score their performance by counting
the number of items correctly recalled, and by counting (and recording) the number of intrusions,
words recalled that were not actually on the lists.
This experiment is based on an experiment implemented in MEL LAB Experiments in
Perception, Cognition, Social Psychology and Human Factors, James St. James, Walter
Schneider and Kimberly Rodgers, 1994, Psychology Software Tools. Their experiment was based
on one by Bower et al (1969).
REFERENCES
Bower, G.H., Clark, M., Lesgold, A., & Winzenz, D. (1969) Hierarchical retrieval schemes in
recall of categorized word lists. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 8, 323-343.
Psy403S02OrgMem.doc