Chunking

Chunking and its effect on short term memory
Word Count: 1,442
Oseas Medina
SL Psychology
Mr. Wiesse 2B
March 3rd 2013

Table of Contents
Abstract: 3
Introduction: 4
Method: 6
Results: 8
Discussion: 11
References: 13
Appendix I: 14
Appendix II: 15
Appendix III: 16
Appendix IV: 17
Appendix V: 18

Abstract
Chunking and its effect on short term memory; it is a replication of the experiment done by Bowler and Springston (1970). The aim of the study is to find out if chunking can help someone recall more information than information that is not chunked. I will be presenting the participants with a PowerPoint and asking them to recall information that is seen on the slides. This experiment was conducted in Ronald Reagan High School, there were 25 participants taking part in the experiment and they ranged from age 16-18. I found that chunking helps short term memory with recalling information that is grouped together or chunked, on average the participants were able to recall about 2.3 more words on the slide that used the chunking technique than the information that was not chunked together. The conclusion was that chunking does significantly help with short term memory recall and I was able to replicate Bower and Springston’s to a considerable extent.

Introduction
Our memory is a complicated thing to analyze and truly understand, there has been many, many experiments on ones memory in an attempt to truly understand its potential.   Atkinson and Shiffrin (1971) discovered that there were three different kinds of memory. Sensory, which is the memory that retains information so that your senses can process it, Long term memory which can retain relatively unlimited information throughout one’s life, this is the memory system that retains significant events that happened during your lifetime, and short term memory which remembers information being presented to you at the moment and can retain a small amount of information that you can retrieve for a...