Developmental psychology.pdf

Memory 241
In this sense Harold Burtt played a vital role in his son's success. The boy, 15
to 33 months of age at the time, sat and perhaps listened, but probably he did not
repeat the material himself, much less encode it in some more usable form. The savings
score of 27 percent is attributable instead to the prodigious rehearsal by his father,
repeating every 240-syllable passage 90 tjmes each. The concepts of short-term memory
and long-term memory were not in ude at the time, but the father knew that some
initial barrier had to be passed if the material was to be retained.
Role of Organization One of the most important requirements for successful longterm
memory is organization. The term organizafioh carries its usual meaning, referring
to some systematic or functional arrangement. Organized material is most readily
remembered. For example, try to remember the following words in any order: by,
gunners, door, a, floods, can, horrible, every. It may be a difficult task, unless you perceive
the organization. The word beginning with a has one letter, the one beginning with b
has two, and so forth up to h. Now read the list slowly once more and then try to recall
all the words.
When the material does not have its own organization, the learner must create
a subjective organization, imposing an organizing scheme on the material by encoding
it in terms of personal experience. The importance of subjective organization has been
demonstrated in a series of experiments comparing free and serial recall. In free recall
the learner is allowed to reproduce the list in any order; in serial recall the items must
be remembered in a particular sequence.
When free and serial recall are compared using tasks too difficult for success
on the first trial, it is found, as expected, that on the first few trials free recall is superior.
The subject using free recall simply responds with the easiest words, wherever
they appear in the list. However, in learning a complete list of several items, the subject
almost invariably memorizes it most rapidly when required to do so serially (Earhard,
1967; Waugh, 1961). The superiority of serial recall strongly suggests that successful
memory is chiefly a result of organization, in this case imposed on the material by the
learner. In fact, memory devices may be most effective in terms of ordering recall (Roediger,
1980).*
Chunking Procedures Another means for storing material in long-term memory
is also readily evident. Try to remember this list of eight terms: long-term memory,
echo, organization, sensory register, short-term memory, icon, encoding, rehearsal.
If you had difficulty, think again of the magical number seven and try chunking,
which means grouping certain items together, forming subgroups. Sometimes the
chunks will be fairly obvious, as perhaps you discovered in the prior example, which
includes three categories: the sensory register, STM, and LTM. The problem, then, is
not to manage eight items, which slightly exceed the processing capacity of short-term
memory, but to remember three categories. Then when you come to each category, you
focus on the items in that group, dealing with a manageable amount: sensory register—
echo, icon; STM—rehearsal; LTM—organization, encoding.
In one study subjects were asked to sort single words into categories. Each
word was written on a separate card and, up to approximately seven, the larger the
number of categories the subject used, the better was the recall. Recall by subjects
using seven categories was approximately twice as successful as that of subjects using
only two (Mandler, 1967).
Regardless of the number of original categories, the degree to which an individual
can organize many small pieces of information into larger units is a vital factor
in the total amount of information that can be recalled.* To the extent that there is
also an organization, or subjective organization, among and within the chunks, retention
will be still further improved.
*l was trying to remember the
starting players on the 1963 New
York Yankees baseball team. At
first I started to reel off the names
that just came to mind: Pepitone,
Mantle, Maris, Howard. But when I
could not remember the rest, I went
by the batting order, beginning to
end, and remembered it readily.
The line-up changed somewhat
after Mantle got hurt, but I
remembered this early one easily:
Kubek, Richardson, Tresh, Mantle,
Maris, Pepitone, Howard, Boyer,
and usually Ford.
'When I was younger, I never
remembered how to spell my older
brother's name, but I finally did so
by thinking of it as two repeating
syllables enclosing a word I
previously knew: "Ge" or "ge."