PSY
429 Experimental Psychology
Experimental Dilemma # 8
Answer
PSY
429 Experimental Psychology
Experimental Dilemma # 8
Answer
An investigator wanted to determine whether the lecvel at which a word is processed would affect its probability of being recalled. Specifically, it was thought that words would be better recalled if they were processed to a deep level than if they were processed only shallowly. The experimenter tested three groups of participants. Participants in each group performed a different task on the words as they were presented. Participants in the graphemic group decided whether each word contained a particular letter. The phonemic group-s task was to determine whether the presenjted word rhymed with another word that they were given. The semantic group decided whether the presented word had a meaning similar to anothe word. The semantic task was believed to require a deeper level of processing than the phenemic task which was thought to involve a deeper processing than the graphemic task. Each participant saw the same list of five words and each word was presented for 15 seconds. Following presentations of the list, participants were asked to recall the words in any order they wished.
|
Type of task |
% Recall |
|
Semantic |
90% |
|
Phonemic |
98% |
|
Graphemic |
99% |
The experimenter concluded that the level of processing of the presented words produced no effect on recall performance since the level of recall did not differ among the three groups.
Do you agree with this conclusion? If not, why?
This conclusion that the level of processing produced no effect on recall performance is precarious because there appears to be a ceiling effect in the present experiment. That is, performance in all three conditions is virtually perfect. This problem might be overcome by presenting longer input lists or by presenting each individual word for a shorter period of time. If recall scores were thus brought down within the range of the dependent measure, the experimenter might very well find differences in performance as a function of the type of orienting task performed on the items at input.
To go back to Dr. Ryan's Home Page, click on kitty.
Celtic Clip Art - http://artinfo@aon-celtic.com