Sdfds

Laboratory assignment on dual-coding theory

Jean-Michel Veillette

Estelle Levesque

Cegep Champlain St. Lawrence

Introduction

In the following laboratory, the experiment of a psychological phenomenon called the dual-coding theory will be discussed, described and analysed. In short, the dual-coding theory is “a theory of cognition hypnotized by Allan Paivio” (Wikipedia, 2012) about the information processing of our brain. In other words, this theory explores the way we process information verbally and visually. The objective of this laboratory is to answer the following question which is “are concrete words easier to remember than abstract words?” related to the theory of verbal associations and visual imagery (Wikipedia, 2012). To do this research we asked to six different subjects to do the experiment with the two lists of sixteen words each; A being the list of concrete words, and B being the list of abstract words. We clearly think that people will remember more concrete words than abstract words because of the association that we can easily do between words and images with concrete words. In this hypothesis, the type of words used, which is concrete and abstract words is the independent variable and the number of words remembered by the subject , which is in fact the memory, is the dependant variable. To understand well this experiment and its variables, some words should be defined. In chronological order, abstract words, concrete words and memory could be defines as “ words that have no reference to material objects or specific examples, words that relate to a particular instance or object and the ability of the mind to store and recall past sensations, thoughts, knowledge, etc” (Reverso, 2008).

Methodology

The methodology of the experiment is crucial to the readers to understand the details of the experiment. First of all, we found at least six people who accepted to do a small experiment in relationship with our psychology class. Our...