Demonstrating Short-Term Memory

In class, there was an activity where we were presented with numbers and what we need to do was remembering it. The result was that I could remember 8 digits of numbers. What I did was shrunk them in groups and remember it separately, similar to how I learn to memorize the telephone numbers. We learned that by setting them up in groups would definitely help us remember those numbers better. In conclusion, we found out that we can remember about 7 digits of numbers (in the range around 5-9).

Demonstration no.2

Another test we did in class demonstrates the serial position effect. While our teachers said out some words, and we tend to remember the first few words and the last few words. However, there’re two faults in the trend, which was with the word “night” and “pineapple”. A lot of us recognized the word “night” is because our teacher repeated the word 3 times. For the word “pineapple”, it stood out because it wasn’t related to any of the words said, and that is called distinctiveness. Thus we come to the conclusion that repetition and distinctiveness help with our memories.

What comes to my surprise was the average numbers of words we can remember. I can remember 9 words; however, the average was about 7, which is similar to the average digits of numbers we could remember in the previous test.

Another thing was that some of us think we remember the word “sleep” though it has never been said. This is the result of what we called “constructive memory” similar to what we called “dejavu”. I was one of those who think they heard the word “sleep,” because I thought since he was saying the words related to the scene of sleeping, then there should be the word “sleep”.