PSY 294 Cognitive Psychology

Student Number: 32636713

Student Name: Geetha Muthu

Tutor: Allie

Tutorial Date/Time: Monday 1.30-3.00 pm

Title: Memory Span

Word Count: words

Approved by Academic Council 4 March 2009 (AC/34/2009)

 Abstract

Memory is a very important component for basic survival and cognitive abilities. This study

looks into the memory span of three different stimuli (digit, letter and words) and the

interruptions that could possibly hinder memory span. Results indicated that memory span on

digits were the greatest, followed by the letters and then words. The research needs to

consider more details on participants who were from many different backgrounds or cultures,

hence we need to take into consideration the possibility on limitation of language especially

acoustics.
Memory has been defined as the ability to reserve and use information which has been

gained through life experiences. Memory provides the necessary tools which is important in

human survival such as perception, language and problem solving. Schooler, J., & Loftus, E.

F. (2014). Memory can be divided into three different components, short term memory

which holds information for a short period of time, sensory memory which is a sensation that

continues after a perception of a stimulus, and long term memory which is capable of storing

information for a long period and can be used when needed. Schooler, J., & Loftus, E. F.

(2014). Lately, working memory has been replaced by short term memory as it’s similar to

short term memory and not only holds information for a short period of time but also used for

the manipulation of information and for complex tasks which is necessary for cognitive

activities. Baddeley, A. (2003). New and old ideas and information are constantly being

altered and desegregated in the working memory. Xu, F. (2016). The working memory

consists of the central executive which breaks down into two other areas. The phonological

loop and visuospatial sketchpad. Gavriel, J. (2016;2015;). The phonological loop consists of

two different components (subsystem) which is the phonological short term store and is

responsible for the speech base information and the articulatory control responsible for inner

speech (within then phonological store). Martín-Loeches, M., Schweinberger, S. R., &

Sommer, W. (1997). Unless information in the phonological loop is rehearsed, it bound to be

lost within a few seconds. There are evidences of the existence of phonological loop system

based on the sound representation in working memory. One being the phonological similarity

effect in which it is harder to recall words that sound the same. Baddeley, A. (2012). The

second evidence is based on the word length. Words which are short and can be pronounced

in 1.5 to 2 seconds are held longer in our memory Mora, G., & Camos, V. (2013) and thirdly,

the articulatory suppression (proactive and retroactive interference) Blocking rehearsal by

requiring the continuous utterance of an irrelevant sound — for example, repeatedly saying

the word ‘the’ will interfere with the stimulus presented. Proactive interference can play a
major role in forgetting especially when the present stimulus matches with previous items.

Existing memory interferes with older information. Baddeley, A. (2010). Retroactive

interference on the hand makes it more difficult to trace old information stored in memory.

The visuospatial sketch pad on the other hand preserves visual nonverbal data in short term

memory. Bruyer, R., & Scailquin, J. (1998). Memory span is an important component in our

day to day cognitive activities, hence, different experiments have been done in the past to

determine the differences of memory span capacity for different stimulus and how and why

interferences occur. This particular experiment focuses on the short term memory (working

memory) span of digits, letters and words. We explore the capacity of working memory for

different stimuli and the interferences that can hinder our retrieval abilities. There were three

independent variables (IV) and therefore there were three hypotheses. The first variable was

digits, the second variable was letters and the third variable was words. The Dependant

Variable was the length of the last list that was recalled correctly.

1. It was hypothesized that the mean list for the digits would be longer than the mean list

for words.

2. It was hypothesized that the mean list for the letters would be shorter than the mean

list for digits.

3. It was hypothesized that the mean list for the letters would be longer than the mean

list for words.

Method

Participants

The participants were from PSY 294 tutorial at Murdoch University. There were a total

of 150 participants (N= 150).

Materials

Each student had to take a short term memory test on the Coglab website on the

computer screen in the lab during tutorial.

Procedure

Each participant was presented with three different stimulus (letter, words, digits)

during the trial. Only one type of stimulus (eg: words) was presented at one trial. At each

trial, a list of items was presented one at a time in random order. The stimulus flashed

sequentially on the screen for a short period of time. The first list consisted of only 3 items.

The longest list in this study consisted of 10 items. Participants had to recall and select these

items in the same order in which they were presented by pressing the correct sequence

among a range of choices that was presented on the screen using the computer mouse. Each

time we got a list correct, the length of the list increased by 1 for the same type of material.

Each time we got a list incorrect, the length of the list decreased by 1.

Results

We examined the mean list of the different stimulus for its memory span capacity. The

descriptive statistics show that the digits have the greatest mean list length. (M = 6.6267, SD

= 1.40252) the second greatest mean list length was for the letters (M=5.8933, SD=1.41491)

and the shortest mean list length was for the words (M=4.0667, SD=.92444). Within subjects

repeated Anova shows an alpha level of .05. Repeated measures ANOVA was conducted to

investigate if there are any differences between the three stimuli. There was a significant

difference between the mean list length of the three stimuli. F (2.298)-264.914, p<0.001.

This supports the three hypotheses that the mean list for digits would be the longest

indicating that we have a larger memory span for digits as compared to letters and words, and

the mean list for the words would be the shortest as the memory span for the words would be

shortest.
Table 1. Means of the list length for three different stimuli

Mean Standard deviation

Digits 6.63 1.40
Letters 5.89 1.41
Words 4.07 .92

Discussion

The aim of the study was to determine the different memory span for each different stimulus

(digits, letters and words) and the longest list that can be retained or recalled .We

hypothesized that digits would be the greatest mean list and the second greatest mean list

would be the letters. The results showed that the greatest mean list length was for the digits.

This indicates that the working memory capacity for digits would be greatest, followed by

memory span for letters and the shortest memory span would be for words. This result is

supported by Bachelder, B. L., & Ray Denny, M. (1977) who suggested that digit spans are

typically larger than word spans and in fact has never been smaller than word span.

According to Bachelder, B. L., & Ray Denny, M. (1977) an individual’s experience with

phone numbers and other digits, will enable him to be more familiar with number pairs,

triplets, etc and through chunking, his digit span score will increase.

As hypothesized, the results indicated that working memory capacity for letters were in

second place in this study, although letters (alphabets) are also single items like the digits. We

found that letters had harder to recall as some had similar acoustic. As suggested by Baddeley

(2012), words which are phonologically similar can have an effect on the recall test. Past

research has suggested that letters like F, S, and X have similar sounds (acoustic) and can be

easily confused verbally or even with verbal presentation and therefore more likely to be

confused in memory. Condrad & Hull (1964). Further, Ellis (1980) found that the
consonants /b/, /m/, /n/, /p/, and/s/, which had similar features were exchanged at a higher

frequency in the recall task as compared to the consonants with lesser shared features.

Interference can be a great hindrance to short term memory errors. Atkins, A. S., Berman, M.

G., Reuter-Lorenz, P. A., Lewis, R. L., & Jonides, J. (2011). The results in this experiment

showed that the shortest mean list length for words. This could be due to the interference of

previously shown words already stored in short term memory. The length of the words were

greater compared to digits and letters. According to Campoy, G. (2011) there is a correlation

between the time taken to rehearse a word and pronounce it. Hence, shorter words can be

rehearsed faster than longer words. Our result is on the third hypothesis is supported by

previous researchers. When an irrelevant speech is presented together with a visual stimuli,

the recall performance shows a worse result than the control group (without the interference

of irrelevant speech) Neath, I., Farley, L. A., & Surprenant, A. M. (2003). Neath, I. (2000)

suggests articulatory suppressions hinder the articulatory control process from rehearsing and

also disrupts the rendering of visually presented items into the phonological store. The

irrelevant speech on the other hand, obstructs the data which is within the phonological store.

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remembered more accurately than long words because they can be refreshed more often

during a fixed interval.older children can remember more words because they know and can

refresh more words.