Context dependent memory

¶ … quiet room than in a noisy room.

Participants

Forty eight students attending to a class were participated and reported their first languages and their ages.

Materials

Twenty words were used to understand the nature of a context-based memory retrieval task. The list of the words is {Prisoner, Biology, Journalist, Child, Search, Dirt, Calculator, Egg, Relationship, Urgent, Age, Freedom, Huge, Employ, Population, Laughter, Injure, Machinery, Violent, and Nature}.

The list of words was shown to the participant for 1 minute in a quiet classroom. Accordingly, the participants were given 2 minutes to write the words in any order. In the first experiment, the room was quiet while the participants were retrieving the words whereas the noise condition of room (i.e., noise room) was changed in the second experiment. In the second experiment, other procedures were exactly the same as first experiment.

Design

The design parameters are the word retrieval in a quiet room vs. In a noisy room. In order to compare the current findings with the related literature, the first language was chosen as the second design parameter.

Since all the participants of two experiments were the same people, within subjects design was chosen for the statistical analysis. F test was chosen with the p

Results

Table 1 is the results of two experiments, performed in the quiet room and the noisy room. Subsequently, figure 1 shows the each participants performance to retrieve the words. The average number of retrieved word for first experiment (indicated in red with asterisk) was calculated as 9.3 and the standard deviation from the mean was 2.87. Surprisingly, the averaged number of words retrieved in the noisy room was 8.6 and standard deviation of from the mean was 3.09. There was no significant room noise condition effect (quiet room vs. noisy room) (F

Discussion

The overall results of the current study suggested that the noise condition of the experiment room does not change the average number of words retrieved in these two particular experiments. This finding was contradictory to the findings by Godden and Baddeley (1975). In their seminal paper, Godden et al. (1975) examined the context dependant memory retrieval with the participant group of deep-sea divers. Divers listened to a prerecorded list of 36 unrelated, two-and-three syllable words either under water or on the beach. The divers were asked to retrieve the words from the list either in the same environment that they listened to the list of prerecorded words or in the alternative environment. Godden et al. (1975) suggested that words learned underwater were best recalled underwater, and words learned on land were best recalled on land. In the same context, Smith (1985) studied the same effect. The task consisted on a list of words presented with background music and the participants were asked to retrieve the words 48 hours after the presentations of the list of the words. The result suggested that the participants recalled more words when the background music was same as the music played during the representation of the list. However, if the background was silent or different music played the number of words retrieved was less (Smith, 1985). In the current study, the list of words were represented in a quiet room; however, the numbers of words retrieved were not significantly more than the experiment in the noisy room regardless of the first language. Although, the latter would not be the main criteria of this study as the first languages of participants were other than English. Therefore, it is not possible to discuss that the earlier experiences with words would help to improve the ability to retrieve more words.