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.