Cognition Brown Peterson Study

Brown-Peterson Study on Short-term Memory and its effectiveness

Mohamed Aqram Bin Mohamed Mydin

Edith Cowan University

Abstract

A lab experiment was conducted in which 311 participants (psychology students) had to recall trigrams (meaningless three-consonant syllables, e.g. TGH) and the distracters involved were grouped into words and non-words. Participants had to indicate if the sequence of the letters formed a word or did not. The test was done in a computer lab using the Coglab Version 2.0 software.

Introduction

It is widely accepted that memory can best be understood in terms of three essential stages (encoding, storage, and retrieval of information) that involve the flow of information through memory system. In general, short-term memory (STM) refers to the limited capacity that the brain can store information for short periods of time. On the other hand, long-term memory (LTM) has unlimited capacity that can keep a large amount of information which can be stored for long periods of time. However, it has been argued that there are dichotomous systems for processing the three essential stages for STM against LTM (Nee, Berman, Moore & Jonides, 2008). In the 1940s, memory loss was widely considered to be the result of new information interfering with previously learned information. In the late 1950s, two groups of researchers (one named Brown and a husband and wife team named Peterson) published data that forced a new interpretation of human memory. According to Peterson and Peterson (1959), evidence showed that the stores of STM and LTM are separate, and yet Melton (1963) argued that the stores are a unitary system. The central executive is in charge of planning future actions, initiating retrieval and decision processes as necessary and integrating information coming into the system. The speech and sound component responsible for the rehearsal of verbal information and ph onological processing is called the...