Revision:Studies into Memory

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Craik and lockhart (1972)

Argued that the concept of rehearsal alone is not sufficient to account for long-term memory. Rehearsal is a kind of processing but it is not very deep. Craik and lockhart believed that it is the 'depth' of processing which determines whether information is stored over a long rather than a short period. Craik and lockhart defined 'depth' in terms of a continuum: an example of shallow processing would be to say whether a word was written in capital letters, whereas an example of deep processing would be to say if the word would fit in a given sentence (this involves semantic processing or a consideration of meaning).

Hyde and Jenkins (1973)

Gave participants five different tasks: the participants were asked to rate a list of words for pleasantness, estimate their frequency of usage, count the letters 'e' and 'g', decide what part of speech it was or decide if the word fitted into certain sentences. When tested for incidental learning (recall without warning ), recall was best in the first two conditions which involved deep processing.

Craik and Watkins (1973)

Showed that rehearsal time does not 'deepen' the memory for material, as would be predicted by the two process- model. They gave subjects the tasks of listening to a series of words but only having to keep in mind the most recent words that begun with a given letter, say, 'd'. Therefore, in the sequence bold, day, fish, track, dirt, subjects will hold day until the word dirt was heard some seconds later. Dirt would in turn become discarded when the next D-word appeared, and so forth. Using this elegant technique it is possible to vary the length of time that subjects spend rehearsing given words. For instance, in the sequence dog, baby, drain, gold, risk, deed, the word drain is rehearsed for approximately twice as long as the word dog (words being read at a constant rate to the subjects). If the two-process theory is correct then the recall of drain should be twice as likely as the recall of dog because it has been rehearsed that much more. However, as predicted by the levels model, type I (maintenance) rehearsal does not influence recall probability, only deeper forms of processing can do so. The results show that subjects are equally likely to recall any of the D-words irrespective of the length of rehearsal time they have been given.

Eysenck (1979)

Shows that the more distinctive or unusual information is, the better it is remembered. He argued from this, that it is not the level of processing as such which matters, but whether the processing requires the person to deal with unusual information. Eysenck (1985) argued that simply thinking of memory in terms of levels of processing on their own, could not account for the variability in how information was remembered, although it might account for some. Eysenck argued that there are at least four factors involved in effective memory: the nature of the task, the type of material which is to be remembered, the person's own knowledge of the idea concerned, and the way that memory performance is tested.

Morris, Bransford and Franks (1977)

Gave evidence against the levels of processing. They said that it is possible that the better recall of meaningful material is due to the way the participants memories were tested. Morris et al (1977) found that if participants were given a rhyming recognition test they remembered the words which had received shallow processing better than the more deeply processed ones.

One more serious criticism was put forward by Badderley, in 1978. Badderley criticised the levels of processing model, on the grounds that the concept of levels was circular, and did not really lead anywhere. The theory states that material which has been strongly processed will be remembered better, but it also works, backwards, if we find that material is well remembered, then we argue that it has been processed deeply! This makes the theory very difficult to test and badderley challenged it on those grounds.

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