Recall patterns

Two men came to a bank. A canoe came. Five men invited them to a war. One man replied and said that he doesn't have weapon. "We have arrows in the boat", they said. The man then told them that he can't go since his family had no idea where he went. He suggested the other man go with them. So the war began. People were dead fighting. The man heard someone said "Let's get out of here quickly. The Indian was hurt." The man felt really strange because he wasn't sick at all. He knew they must be ghosts. He went home later and told the others the story. He said that he had been to the war with the ghosts and saw people die. The next morning when the sun rose he fell down and black smoke came out of his mouth. People jumped up and cried. He was dead.

Two men came near to a bank. They saw a boat coming. When they were asked to go to a war, one man suggested another man go with them. The people in the boat persuaded him by saying that they've got arrows for the battle. During the war, many were killed. The man didn't feel sick or hurt. "Let's get out of here" he heard someone say. He left with the other men. He told people about the battle. He said that those people must be ghosts. The sun arose and he fell to the ground. Black smoke came out of his mouth. He was dead.

Two men came to a bank of a river. They saw a boat come around. One of the men in the boat asked them to join a battle. One of the two replied that they've got no weapon. The men in the boat said there are arrows in the boat. One of the two men said he need go home to tell his family where he went, he asked the other man to go with those warriors. During the battle, he saw people wounded and killed. But he didn't get hurt at all. Suddenly, he heard someone say that they should run away. So he ran with them and then he came home later. He told his family about the war. He said, I think they are ghost. After the word, he fell down on the ground. And smoke came out of his mouth. The man was dead.

 

The yellow mark indicates the part that appeared in the 1^st but missed from the 2^nd recall.

The blue mark indicates the part that was not in the 2^nd but reappeared in the 3^rd recall.

Cognitive economy can be observed in my recall. Numbers, names, adjectives, and figurative are often omitted when I was trying to retrieve information from semantic memory. The first recall retained most of the redundant information. These detailed descriptions are missing in the second and third recall. In general, information that is related closely to the storyline and key points that make the narrative meaningful is recalled most smoothly.

The amount of information and detail level maintained by the second and third recall was similar. This might indicate that the long term memory is stable and over time, little variation occurs during retrieval.

It seems that the unusual and unreasonable details, if retrieved at all, are done more easily and accurately. For instance, "the black smoke came out from the mouth". Compared with other additive, the color of the smoke is recalled accurately every single time. However, there was a tendency to normalize, as is stated in the Bartlette study, the irregular events. I tried to make the story more sensible by omitting the part that the two men went to a river to hunt seals. To me, it seems that hunting seals at a river is rare and unreasonable. Moreover, I even added things that are not in the original story. Smoke is not mentioned anywhere in the story, but I made this up every time I recalled.

One strange thing about the recall was that at the 3^rd time, I seemed to have picked up some detail that was omitted in the second recall. This might be considered as evidence that the stored information is not really "gone" from the memory. If something is not retrieved successfully, it's more likely that the information was not activated rather than "disappearing" from the storage.

It's also interesting to notice that the manner I recalled this story was rather visual. While working on the task, I was trying really hard to pick up the visual cues stored in the memory. And the completion of the task resembles depicting a series of pictures, as if I was going through a set of comics. It's possible that the details I gathered were merely deduction from the images that I was "seeing" in my head when I completed the recall task.

Concept map

When I asked my subject to come up with a concept map for the causes of seasons, her first reaction was to jokingly ask who needs a map for that. So I had to explain to her what a concept map is all about. Still, she keeps throwing me all kinds of questions, such as what do you mean by "the hierarchical structure of a concept." I then decided to show her a sample concept map so that she could have a concrete idea about what a real concept map should look like. Before this, I had no idea that the concept of a concept map itself takes extra time and effort to be delivered. It appears that an "anchor concept maps" is much needed when we try to engage people to complete this task for the first time.

Before reading the materials about this topic, the subject was asked to draw a concept map based on her pre-existed understanding. The map was pretty simple, with a single causal relationship between the "orbiting of the earth" and "seasons". This is a seemingly right answer, since the seasons are in some ways related to the orbiting. However, when I asked her to explain the connection between these two factors, she responded that the when earth is shielded from the sun by the moon, that part of the earth is winter. This is a blatantly incorrect response. Then I showed her the reading and suggested her to pay close attention to the earth's relationship with the sun, rather than with the moon.

I also encouraged her to put down more nodes before she started. This time the relationship between the factors that are involved in the formation of the seasons are organized with much greater detail and logical sequence. She also succeeded in labeling the connections between those factors when I asked her to.

A comparison between the pre and post concept map shows that for one thing, a concept map that requires more detailed description of the knowledge can reveal the problematic conception. For another, the understanding of a certain concept can be changed and enriched and might be able to indicate learning. But before such learning takes place, erroneous prior knowledge should to be identified and corresponding instructions is needs to be implemented.

Long term memory

My subject was able to recall 17 words from the list with an accuracy rate of 16/20.

After an hour, she was able to recall 16 words, with an accuracy rate of 14/20.

I was really surprised to see that she could perform so well at the immediate and delayed retrieval of these seemingly random words. Especially when I noticed that during the hour interval, she was filling out dozens of envelops, which is quite an interfering task for a memory test. So I asked her what she was doing during the 10 seconds interval between the presentations of two words. She said that she was trying to connecting the words together with meanings, engaging in an activity that is similar to elaborative rehearsal. Interestingly, for both immediate and delayed recall, there is an obvious sequential pattern that certain words always appear adjacently. It is evident that the subject was grouping the words during storage. This result corroborates the notion described in the Ashcraft article that "material that was rehearsed elaboratively should be more permanently available for retrieval from memory."

One thing also noteworthy is that the subject reported that it was harder to recall the words on the last part of the list. 2 of the 4 words she missed on the first recall were the last 2 words on the list. This might be due to the fact that she did not write down the last words first when it comes to recall, but was following the order she used during elaborative rehearsal. Consequently, Less time and effort was used rehearsing the last words and writing down the primary words might also have interfered with the recalling of these words at the end of the list.

Retrieval patterns

Results:

Both subjects are Chinese native speakers.

Result of Subject A, read to mostly in Chinese, with all the letters and two line of words in English.

Results of Subject B, read to in English only.

Patterns

The recalling of the numbers has the highest accuracy rate. The longest lists of random letters and random words have the lowest rate of accurate retrieval.

The results also indicate that the numbers, letters, words at the beginning and at the end of the lists have an accuracy rate close to 100%. And both subjects reported that it was easier to recall the items at the beginning and at the end of a list. They also claimed that the backward interference was most obvious for the items in the middle.

When read to using the first language, the subject performed much better on the longer word list than on the shorter list read in English. This is also true for the lists of numbers.

Semantic cue was very helpful in recalling. When one subject realized that one of the lists is actually a sentence, the recall rate was much higher than the previous lists. The other subject who failed to realize the semantic cue of this list did not perform distinguishably better on this longer list of words.

Both subjects also pointed out that when they were able to chunk the information down into groups using whatever cues there are, they would find retrieval more convenient.

Conclusions: Factors that might play an important role in retrieval

Encoding and retrieval cues

Numbers and letters are much more abstract than words. However, the task of recalling numbers was reported as the easiest. As an exception, when the letters and words can be chunked or regrouped based on semantic cues, the subjects find it easier to recall. Thus, when clues are present for encoding, the storage and retrieval can be carried out more smoothly.

When the subjects are exposed to information in a second language, extra time and effort are needed to encode the same amount of information presented in first language. This indicates the fact that prior knowledge is important in the encoding of new information. And both subjects reported that there was an involuntary tendency to translate the second language into their mother tongue, costing more time and resulted in the interference of receiving other incoming words. Therefore, the subjects' prior knowledge in this case affected their performance negatively.

One subject reported that she was trying to visualize the words I read to her, and performed better on the list of words that can be visualized.

So both semantic and visual cues can be used in encoding and retrieval. There might be an individual difference on the preference of these strategies.