Demonstration 3: Meaning Enhances Recall

Today in class we did another demonstration with the purpose of showing that meaning enhances memory recall. Our instruction was to look at 20 cards each with a word and a letter, A or B. If the card has a letter A, then we have to count the number of syllables in the word shown with the letter. If the card has B, then we need to judge whether the word is pleasant or unpleasant. After 20 words, we were asked to write down all the words that we can remember. The numbers of words remembered by each member of the class vary.

The most number of words remembered was 20 and the least was 10, with even distribution in between. This shows that each person’s ability to remember varies. As mentioned in the video “Remembering and Forgetting”, what we remember depends on who we are and our experiences. Some students used mnemonic devices while other did not. The modes of number of words recalled are 15 and 10, so the result is bimodal. The students who only recall little number of words experience interference. The new words, new information, interfere with the old words, old information, so the old words got lost.

Now let’s look at what words are remembered.
The class result shows that:
3 students recalled more A words and B words.
4 students recalled the same number of A words and B words.
9 students recalled more B words and A words.

This evidently illustrates that the tendency to remember increase when there is meaning to the input information. For the B words, we were asked to judge whether the word is pleasant or unpleasant, this creates meaning to our brain so we remember it better. For A words, we were asked to count the syllables, which makes no meaning to our brain, therefore, we remember the words less vividly. In conclusion, “meaning enhances memory recall.”