experimentin pt 3 ;)

Hey everyone! So this is the blog I mentioned in the previous post about how I was going to demonstrate an experiment over memory. Now I'll basically give y'all a detailed write up of how my experiment went. :)

So my experiment was dealing with how people can create false memories even in short amounts of time. I took my friend Paige and asked her to listen to me as I read a list of words aloud to her. I told her to remember as much as she could so that once I was done, she could write down the ones that she did actually remember. I read the following words to her;

• thread
• pin
• eye
• injection
• syringe
• sewing
• sharp
• point
• hurt 
• knitting
• prick
• thimble
• haystack 
• pain

Immediately after I read these to her, Paige wrote down the following words

• thimble
• haystack
• pin
• eye
• sharp
• needle

I found it quite interesting by the words that she remembered. If y'all noticed, Paige wrote down the word "needle" which was not on the list. Kinda funny right? She formed what I mentioned before, a false memory. Her brain had words thrown at it and a general similarity of words could definitely by "needle".

I then asked her to do the same exact thing except this time with a long list of words;

• bed
• drowse
• awake
• nurse
• tired
• sick
• dream
• lawyer
• wake
• medicine
• snooze
• health
• snore
• hospital 
• rest
• dentist
• blanket
• physician 
• doze
• patient
• stethoscope
• slumber
• peace
• yawn
• surgeon 

Now after I read these words, Paige wrote down the following;

• drowse
• bed
• awake
• snooze
• wake
• clinic
• hospital 
• nurse
• stethoscope 

After her saying these words, I began to realize that it was harder for her to recall more words the longer she waited to write them down. Though I did realize that she remembered the word "stethoscope", which is very noticeable since it's the longest word in the list. 

I then proceeded to ask Paige if she had written down the word "aardvark" and she definitely looked at me like what the heck Courtney. Then I asked her if she wrote down either of the words "doctor" or "sleep" to see if she again formed a false memory. This time she didn't which I think is partly because there was twice the amount of words in the second list than the first list. 

Now we looked to see if she had written down either of the following words,

• pain (last item)
• thread (first item)
• sharp (middle item)
• point (middle item)

Paige remembered the word "sharp". This right here demonstrates the serial position effect, which is basically just being able to recall wither the first and last word or the middle words of a list.

Overall, Paige definitely found this task to be challenging because when you listen to a list, you try and start to remember but then you feel as though you get messed up trying to remember as they keep telling you words. I also did attempt this task and found it a lot more challenging than it seemed. 

xoxo, court ;)