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.