Class Demonstration : M E M O R I E S

Demonstration 1: Immediate memory Span

In this demonstration, we are asked to remember a series of numbers ranging from 3 to 12 numbers, and recite them when a series is read. After checking the results, which I ended up making a mistake at 9-digit number, Mr. Anthony explained that our sensory memory span can take in about 7 things at a time, and that regular people can remember things in the range of 7-9 stimuli. Yet he told that there are several students who were able to complete the series until 12-digit number. Moreover, he explained the use of chunking, a strategy that would help us remember series of numbers or words by putting them together in little pieces of 3 or 4, and recall them as sets of number. This example of chunking can be seen in our daily life through telephone numbers, social security numbers, and words that are written.

Demonstration 2: Short Term Memory

Again Mr. Anthony asked us to remember, but this time in series of words. He read out about 20 words to the class, which some of them repeated. Then he asked us to write everything we can recall. As a result, the mean score of the words that the class remembered was 7. However, there were some astounding findings in the results of the demonstration. It is that some of us remembered the words that were not there. Mr. Anthony later explained that we constructed the words that are not there by ourselves from making associations with other words, this kind of memory is called the constructive memory. In addition, Mr. Anthony went into the impact of the serial position effect, or the primary-recency effect, that most of us remembered the words that came first and last and not the ones in the middles. Moreover, there are words in the list that could be chunked together to remember such as toss and turn, and that there was a word that was different from others and we remembered it by its distinctiveness, which in this demonstration was the word pineapple.