Research & Teaching
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Memory

Research Summary

For Instructors

For Students

How Do Undergraduates Remember What They Learned in Introductory Psychology?

Conway, M.A., Gardiner, J.M., Perfect, T.J., Anderson, S.J., & Cohen, G.M. (1997). Changes in memory awareness during learning: The acquisition of knowledge by psychology undergraduates. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 126, 393-413.

For Instructors

Links to the Lecture

Prepare a demonstration of how general (semantic) information is better recalled than specific (episodic) information such as presented in one of the following studies:

Sachs, J.S. (1967). Recognition memory of syntactic and semantic aspects of connected discourse. Perception and Psychophysics, 2, 437-442. Sachs had participants read a passage about Galileo. While the participants were reading, she interrupted them to present a comparison sentence for recognition. The comparison sentence either used a different word order but retained the meaning of a sentence in the passage (word order change) or had a different meaning (meaning change). She presented the comparison sentence following various delays. Memory for word order information decreased with the delay but memory for the meaning did not decrease with delay.

Bransford, J.D., & Franks, J.J. (1971). The abstraction of linguistic ideas. Cognitive Psychology, 2, 331-350. Participants read passages made up of sentences containing one - three facts in a sentence. Then they were presented with test sentences that were either identical to the passage sentences or were novel combinations of information presented in the passages. Confidence ratings of the test sentences increased with the number of facts included in the sentence.

A Quick Experiment

Replicate the Conway et al. study: Develop a 10-item quiz, 5 questions on material from the beginning of the course and 5 questions from recent material, and include the categories from Conway et al. as shown in the Appendix to the article. Administer to the students, have them determine their own proportion correct by category, and create a bar chart comparing the earlier questions to the recent questions. Discuss perceptions of knowing.