Sports and animals Essay Example for Free

Sports and animals Essay This would explain the large quantity of participants remembering Uganda and chimpanzee, for example, as they are very infrequently used and may have stood out from the more generic words in the table. This may also account for why words like China, cow and swimming were frequently forgotten: they are neither very common nor uncommon in their usage in everyday life, nor are they stereotypical of their respective categories. What is meant by this is if the question was asked name a sport, it is unlikely that the answer swimming would be given, whereas football would be a more likely answer, despite swimming being a relatively common word to encounter. This builds on the idea of categories acting as recognition cues for subsequent words. Also interesting was the distribution of recalls by category: colours were recalled the most frequently (85/120), compared with sports and animals (both 77/120) and, least frequently, countries (64/120). There could be several explanations for this, but it appears to constitute primarily of two factors: the frequency of usage, and the size of the categories domains. For example, colours are frequently used words and there are relatively few words that fall under that category; sports and animals are also categories from which often-used words are drawn, but there are many more words that fit into them than there are for colours; and countries are less frequently-used words. Therefore, a decrease in common usage and an increase in size may lead to proactive interference, causing more confusion and, occasionally, incorrect words to be recalled. This is demonstrated, for example, in that the word America was recalled three times despite it not being on any of the lists (see Appendix 1). In the results from Condition B, there is also evidence that primacy and recency may have occurred. Respectively, green and dog are the first and last words on the grid, and they were recalled by 10 and 9, respectively, of the 10 participants in that condition. No such effect was found, however, in Condition A, suggesting that the order in which words are sequenced has little effect if there is a more significant method of organisation present (in this case, categories). These patterns indicate that organisation is the key factor in remembering information, but at any one time there may be several methods of organisation occurring simultaneously, such as the words semantic categories, the order that the words are written down, and the frequency of the words usage, among others.  This study did, however, have limitations; the most prominent of which is the potential lack of population validity as a result of the relatively small sample size used and the highly restricted age group from which participants were drawn. This could be overcome in future research by widening the target population and using a larger sample in order to identify trends in more detail. In terms of ecological validity, the study uses artificial stimuli to test memory, and naturally occurring stimuli could be used instead in order to observe the effects of organisation on learning in a natural setting and thus improve the ecological validity. There are implications of this study for many aspects of life which involve learning, but particularly education. It has shown that information is better learnt when organised, either upon presentation or as a mental process. The implication of this is that pupils and students may learn information more efficiently through teaching methods involving organising information into structures and providing tasks to do so if the information is not already organised. The former would provide explicit organisation, and the latter would allow individual pupils and students to find their own ways to learn greater amounts of information. Future research might aim to investigate further into the effects of categorisation. This could be done by using a larger list of words or by drawing words from more distinct categories, and observing if, how and how much participants categorise these words; and relating this to the amount of information they remember. A wider target population would also be beneficial. It is often cited that children learn information more efficiently than older adults, and giving participants from the two age groups the same task and comparing the results would provide insight into how the process of learning is different between them, if indeed it is different. To conclude, this study has found no significant effect of organisation of information upon the learning of this information, but organisation cannot be ruled out as a significant factor. It may be the case that organisation upon encoding, rather than presentation, is the factor that determines the storage of the information. This organisation may be in the form of categorisation, but individual differences exist with regard to how this information is organised. Other factors may be how commonly the information is experienced in the given context, and how many recognition cues are available for the information to be recalled. References BOUSFIELD, W.A. (1953). The occurrence of clustering in the recall of randomly arranged associates. Journal of General Psychology, 49, pp. 229-240.  BOWER, G.H., CLARK, M.C., LESGOLD, A.M. WINZENZ, D. (1969). Hierarchical retrieval schemes in recall of categorized word lists. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behaviour, 8, pp. 323-343.