Story Recall

This story, after reading it, is stored in my semantic memory, where our shared knowledge of the world is placed. As time goes by, changes happen to the recall of the story content. It is interesting that the number of letters increases each time for my three-time recalls (117 for the first time, 145 for the second time and 161 for the third time). The reason might be that during later recalls, I was afraid that I had forgotten more things than the first time recall, so I elaborated more on the things that I could recall, whereas during the first recall, I did not elaborate because I was hurried to write down all the things that left in my mind after reading.

A lot of details are contained in the first paragraph, like the time, the name of places, the description of the sounds, the thoughts of the young men, people on the canoe....But I missed several details and captured the gist of the meaning. It seems to me that when a lot of detailed information are gathered, it is hard to memorize them all.

For me, more attention was given to the two young men and I recalled their words and actions. I paid less attention to the others words, thus I recalled little about other warriors. Like when the people on the canoe first came to the two young men, they asked the two to join them, but I failed to recall this, only what the young men's response.


I remember that when I was reading the story, I read more slowly and carefully in the first part about one returned and one came to war. I read the ending part quickly and not attentively. I remember that at the time when I just finished reading, I only got the idea that people got killed in the war and when the young man came back to village, he died finally. Since less information is captured during the acquisition process, it definitely would make the recall hard to have some elaborations, thus I did not recall much of the ending.


It seems to me that the idea of what we have got from the story is the prime information in mind and it is hard to forget it. During recall, the idea can be represented with different words. In stead, the specific words and details in the story are hard to have a permanent place in the memory. The recall process relies on the meaning of the story, rather than the details of original words or phrases, though somethimes they are indeed memorized well for some people.

This concept map visually represents the participant's knowledge about cooking.

From the map we can see that there are three main subtypes under the general term "cooking", namely, types of recipes, methods of cooking and tools used for cooking. By observing the map it is not difficult for us to see that among these three subtypes, recipes occupy the biggest portion and tools the fewest. From this we can conlude that the participant is more familiar, or has more prior knowledge structured around different types of recipes in terms of cooking. And within the recipe subtype, Indian, Mexican and American are the most familiar recipes to him, as the structures for these types are more complicated than for the Chinese's.

By this visual representation with symbols, we can quickly and easily get a holistic understanding about the participant's mental development in this specific domain. Since different subtypes are marked with different colors, it is very clear that his knowledge about the tools are not so developed as about recipes and methods for cooking. Indeed, during his doing of this map, he struggled with the names of the tools. Thus the brainstorming in this part is also much shorter than the other two parts.

The process of producing this map is also a process that the participant organizes his thought and knowledge in the domain of cooking, since he needs to pay attention to the relations between concepts, say, which concept is linked to which and with a certain term, what can be generated from it and what can be next to it on the same level.

Also in the process of making this map, the participant was reminded of a lot of words or experiences about cooking inspired by drawing the circles and writing words. Here the map serves as a learning enhancement by which the participant can learning or relearn some knowledge and enhance it.

In all, concept map is an easy and clear way of representing information structure in a person's mind for others to see visually and this process is also beneficial to the participant who can organize one's thought and ideas and enhance the knowledge at the same time.

Long-term Memory Test

I did this test with the same participant who have done the first memory test. We sat along a long table in his office in the afternoon, around 3:30 and began the test.

Above is the result of his test.

We can see that he memorized 14 words the first time and 12 the second time. The two that missed the second time are "analysis" and "brush". It seems that there is no big difference between the two times. Once the words are memorized the first time, they are not easily forgotten after an hour in the second time.

After my interview with the participant at the end of the second test, I know that the method he used to memorize the words is to relate the words with his personal experiences. Then by recalling his past events, he recalled the words. That is to say that he tried to store the words in his episodic memory. For instance, the first two items are the commonly seen objects in his office (paper and seat), so he did not relate them to any stories, but he got confused with seat and chair. We can see here that the synonyms of a word which are also commonly used by a person can be an intervening element in memorization. For the word Tire, he relates it with a place (the method of loci), a cetain state where his grandma lived and he changed his tire there. Then the next word "love" cause he loves his grandma. And they used to go to the "beach". They also did some "analysis" about what they should do for the holidays and after that they had some "conjunctions". For the word "brush", he related it with a girl he dated in high school who likes brushing her hair and asked him to keep a brush in his car so that she could brush her hair any time. But he did not recall this in the second recall. For the word "hunger" he related it with the fact that when he was a teenager, he always felt hungry (but he did not recall this word in either time) and also as a teenager, he learned to use "keyboard". He loves sports, and the players have "numbers" on their clothes. Still as a teenager, he did not drink (as related to "bottle"). The most interesting thing happened to the memorization of "wheel". (Cont.) When he heard the word "wheel", he memorized it by associate it with his favorite hockey team call "red wings", which has a red wheel with a wing as the team symbol. He memorized the image, but when he recalled the image, the "wing" replaced the "wheel" in his memory and he thought that I mentioned "wing" or "wings". This may due to the reason that in everyday experiences, the wing image impresses him more than the wheel image does.

Then for the last word system, he memorized it by relating it to the fact that the sports teams have their operating system.

Memory Test

The participant of my memory test is a male native speaker who is in his thirties and is working on PhD degree in Special Education program. The test began at noon in the participant's office while we sitting at a round table. He turned his his left side to me and faced the wall, because he thought that as such he would not be able to see the paper in my hand with all the numbers and letters.

Above is the result description of his test:

In the number groups, we can see that the Magic Number Seven works well for him. He can memorize all the numbers when the quantity is fewer or close to seven (Though he put 4 in front of 5 in the second group). When the quantities become bigger, he gets confused. Sometimes he adds numbers that are not there, sometimes he misplaces number and sometimes when he tries to recall the exact sequence of certain numbers, he gets totally at lost for the others.

In the letter groups that do not form words, he got mistake in every group. The first group (T S Y L Q P) is the only one that one letter is missed (though there is consequence problem). It comes to the conclusion that random letters that do not make any sense when grouped are very hard to memorize, especially when the quantity is more than seven. This conclusion is strengthened by the participant's telling me that he got "QWERTY" exactly correct in the third letter group because he was taught by his teacher in the past that the keyboard of a computer is called "qwerty" board, since these letters are in the same row on the keyboard. Thus when he heard these letters read, he chunk them into a group as one unit, which facilitates his recalling.

As to the letter groups that form words, the participant admitted that these are different from the previous letters in that he could memorize each word as a unit, no matter how many words are there, which he could not do when the letters do not make sense when grouped.

The first group can be regarded as 5 units, which is easy for him to memorize and he got them correct.

It is interesting to see that for the following three groups, the number of words he got correct never passes the Magic Number Seven. (For the PAPER and BAG groups, he both got 5 words correct). The correct number increases in the LOVE group. He got seven correct. It should due to the reason that there are the sementic relations between every two neighboring words.

The last group is repeated quite smoothly by the participant. It is quite easy for him. He said that is because all the words can make sense and form a sentence, and the sentence becomes one unit in his head.