Information Processing Post 2

· Go to the webpage above and complete the activity (the first one, you don’t need to click Continue and do the second on the next page). Make sure to write down your story.

The first time I did it with just saying the words of the objects over and over again, and after the 2 minutes I could only come up with 9 of the 20 objects.

· Next, share your story with us as a blog entry (we should all be working from the same 20 objects, so it will be interesting to compare the different ways that we encoded).

First of all, I just want to say my story is so crazy, but here it goes. I recorded my voice of the story to begin with. Here is my crazy story:

The TV was hit by the bow and arrow because the deer came through the living room as he was playing with the play bow and arrow set. For breakfast that day the dad had some donuts and milk, which came from a cow on his farm, but while he was milking the cow earlier that day, he saw a mouse and decided to set up a mouse trap. Then for dinner he decided he would have a crab because he saw his goldfish and remembered he wanted seafood. For dessert for that day he had a nice cake. It was time for him to go to bed, but he decided his hair was a little too long, so he decided to take a comb through it and cut it using his very nice pair of barber scissors, so after that he decided to go to bed. Before he actually went to bed, he sat down in a nice comfy chair and put his hat on him, and then he saw a nice gift box sitting by the chair, so he decided to open it up and it was a little elephant! “How cute!” he thought. And then before he knew it, he was asleep in his bed, dreaming about a clown who was going after a bear.

After the story, I wrote down the objects that I remember and I remembered 16 out of the 20 objects!

· Describe your experience in trying this activity. Was it surprising? Difficult?

This activity was surprising actually. I have a bad memory when it comes to doing activities like these, and usually I just give up. I remember in elementary school when doing standardized tests that included tests like these, I would be so frustrated that I wanted to scream and wouldn’t even try anymore, I would guess at the rest of the memory section. When I did it just doing maintenance rehearsal, I only remembered 9 of the 20 objects, but remembered 16 of the 20 when I did the story, and this actually surprised me, I didn’t think my score of how many objects I remembered would improve that much. The story helped a lot, and I didn’t expect it to, but my question is, if doing questions with these memory type games helps that much (as for me it did), why don’t teachers teach this strategy in elementary school? I think it would help the scores on the standardized tests that involve memory sections.

· Explain HOW this activity (or another form of elaboration) influences memory. How does it connect to working memory capacity? Will this storytelling strategy affect sensory or long term memory? Why?

This activity influences memory through encoding the objects, through changing the form of the objects. At first the objects are just that, only objects with no meaning, but after the story the objects sort of have meaning because one can connect objects to other objects through what happened in the story. If one remembers the beginning of the story, then they might remember the middle, which allows them to remember more of the objects. It connects to working memory capacity because 5-9 objects can be remembered for 5-20 seconds, but can be longer if rehearsed, unlike the first activity when one just remembers the objects through sensory memory which only lasts 1-3 seconds at most, but does have unlimited capacity but one would hardly be able to remember all 20 objects within the 1-3 seconds. This storytelling strategy affects long term memory more because it involves rehearsal, chunking, and encoding for the information to be retrieved later. Also, a story is easier to remember for long term than sensory because it has context and meaning.