Memory studies

Baddeley et al (1975).  The word length effect - how the length of a word affects free recall.

Bower et al (1969) two groups of participants were presented with a list of words. For one group the words were in a random order, whereas for the other group they were arranged under categories. After looking at the list, participants were asked to recall as many words as they could remember. Participants who had the organized lists recalled significantly more words than participants who had random lists.

Bransford, J.D. & Johnson, M. K. (1972). A study of how schema affect memory.  This study looked at whether hearing a title before a passage is read would actually affect the amount of the passage that would be recalled.  There is more than one version in the original paper.  Students may, of course, write their own passage to make it more relevant to their participants.

Coltheart (1992) Testing the Working Memory Model. The extent to which phonological similarity of words impairs short-term memory recall. Concurrent irrelevant articulation lowered recall and abolished the phonological similarity effect for both repeated and novel word lists.

Etnier & Labban (2011).  This is a great study for students who are interested in sport and exercise. The original study had three conditions: exercise before, exercise after, and no exercise while listening to a prose paragraph. Only the exercise performance condition showed significantly higher performance on recall.

Kargopoulos, Bablekou, Gonida and Kiosseoglou (2003). A study that shows when information is paired with a photograph, memory is better than when it is matched with text only.

Loftus and Palmer (1974).  Participants asked how fast cars were going when they smashed into each other, after viewing a car accident, report greater speeds than do participants asked the speed when they ‘hit’ each other.

Mandler (1967) In one of Mandler’s studies, participants were given 52 cards with a randomly selected word on each card, they were then asked to sort the cards into between 2 – 7 categories of their choice. They were then asked to recall as many words as they could remember. The more categories the participants had used, the higher their recall of words.

Miller (1956). The original chunking experiment is difficult to replicate as the original study is rather difficult for most students to read. But we are allowed to base our studies on an original study or theory, so this link is a good idea for how to set up an experiment to test Miller's theory of the Magic 7.

Paivio (1971). Imagery vs rehearsal: participants recall more words from a (20) word list when they use an imagery method (forming a vivid mental image and linking each item to the last in a dynamic fashion) than if they use either rehearsal (repeat each item until you hear the next) or no particular method (no prior instruction). 

Perham & Vizard (2010) Does background music impair memory? Serial recall was tested under quiet, liked, and disliked music sound conditions as well as steady-state (repetition of ‘3’) and changing-state speech (random digits 1–9). Results revealed performance to be poorer for both music conditions and the changing-state speech compared to quiet and steady-state speech conditions.

Peterson & Peterson (1959, p. 194) In the memory task, the participant viewed a trigram of consonants (e.g., GKT, WCH,...) and then performed a number of algebraic computations (e.g., counting backwards by 3s) for less than 20 seconds. The data showed that recall of the trigram was less likely as the participant worked on the algebraic computations for longer durations.

Rogers, Kuiper and Kirker (1977). A different aspect of levels of processing theory - this looks at what happens when we make a personal connection to what we are learning - the effect of self-referencing. A sample of a replication of this study can be found here.