Demonstration No.3
“Meaning enhances recall”

In this demonstration, we were told to remember the words. However, this time there would be letters write at the bottom right corner, which determines what we have to do when we saw the word. If the letter was “A”, we need to count the syllable, and if the letter was “B”, we need to decide whether it’s unpleasant or pleasant.

The result was that there’s a wide range of numbers of words we can remember. That is so because:
+ Wide range of Individual differences, different ability to remember the words. There’re people that can only remember 10 words, and there’s a person who can remember 20 words. The results represent the bimodal distribution.
+ Due to the serial position effect, we are able to remember the first few words and the last few words better than the ones in the middle. That is also because of “inference”, in which new information interferes with the memorization of old memory or old information interferes with the encoding of the new information.
+ Another thing that we learn from this demonstration was that meaning enhances recall. We did what we were told to do, and most of us can remember more words that has a letter “B” on the right bottom corner. That is so because it is related the meaning of the words rather than just counting the syllables. Although I remember more “As” than more “Bs”, but the majority of the class is able to remember the “B” words more than the “As”.

Therefore we can conclude that by associating the meaning of the word to what we already know would definitely help us to remember the words.