Report of My Own Investigation

Report of my own psychological investigation

The investigation conducted looks into the effects of age on the short term memory, the experiment that has been used was the trigrams experiment divided into categories of young people and older people.

Abstract- The subject that was chosen to be studied was the effects of age on the short term memory. The experiment used was the trigrams, 3 sets of trigrams were shown at different intervals and the participant would have to memorise the trigram while counting backwards in 3’s from a set number shown to then on a screen. The intervals used were 9 seconds, 15 seconds and 30 seconds. The results that were acquired were similar to what was expected in terms of age but different in terms of when the participants were incorrect. It would be expected that the participants would be incorrect on the final trigram but some participants were able to correctly recall the second and third trigram but were not able to recall the first trigram, this challenges the idea that the short term memory has a duration that lasts 18-30 seconds. The participants involved in the study are divided into two categories, young people and older people. the young people category is ages 16-24 and the older people category is 40+.

Introduction-

This investigation was conducted to see how age effects the duration of the short term memory, this area was chosen to be studied as it is commonly thought that as we age the memory becomes weaker so this area was chosen to see if this theory was correct or not.

Here are three pieces of background research that have been obtained that link to the investigation.

Background research

Research 1- Trigrams study

Website- http://www.simplypsychology.org/peterson-peterson.html

Date- Thursday 11th June 2015.

Peterson and Peterson, 1959

Aim: To investigate the duration of short-term memory, and provide empirical evidence for the multi-store model.

Procedure: A lab experiment was conducted in which 24...