Memory Case Studies

Peterson & Peterson

• Aim: To see if you need to rehearse information, for it to be stored in the short term memory.
• Method: They gave participants groups of letters to learn (trigrams) e.g, AKD GVA . Once the participants had been given these trigrams, they were told to immediately start counting back in threes for different lengths of time. This was done to prevent rehearsal.
• They were asked to try and recall the trigrams after a short time.
• Results: Peterson and Peterson found that the participants had forgotten virtually all of the trigrams after 18 seconds.
• Conclusion: That we cannot hold information in the short term store unless we rehearse it

MURDOCK

• Aim: To support the Multi-Store explanation of
• Method: Murdock’s participants had to learn a list on words, one at a time, for two seconds each. And then recall the words in any order.
• Results: Murdock found that the participants recalled the last words very well (recency affect) and the first words quite well (primacy affect), but the words in the middle were not recalled very well.
• Conclusion: Bartlett concluded that this provides evidence for the separate memory stores.
• Murdock claims that the recency affect proves that the words where still in the short term memory, and that the primacy affect proves that those words had transferred into the long term memory.

Bartlett

• Aim: To see if people, when given something unfamiliar to remember, would alter the information.
• Method: Bartlett asked his participants to read a story, the story was a Red Indian Folk Tale called the ‘War of the Ghosts’, a story containing spirits, ghosts and different type of structure. This story was unfamiliar to the participants, who were of western culture. He then created a chain of people for the story to be told trough, person A tells person B, B to C. The participants were asked to retell the story as accurately as possible. The story was retold multiple times during this study.
• Results: Bartlett found that the story got shorter, more orderly and coherent, even if it disagreed with the original. He found that participants ending up leaving out bits of the story, especially the supernatural parts.
• Conclusion: Our memory is influenced by our own beliefs.