How does where you learn something affect your ability to remember it?

Aim:

To investigate how context affects memory.

Hypothesis:

Changing context (location) of learning affects ability to recall learnt information.

Introduction:

We chose to investigate whether changing the location between memorising and then recalling a list of words effects the number of words you are able to recall, we chose to investigate this as we believe that these results could be applied to a real life situation for example when students are revising for a test, would it be more beneficial to learn and memorise the material within the same location in which they would be asked to recall it? Our hypothesis is non-directional as we did not think a directional hypothesis was suitable due to a lack of prior knowledge on the subject as no other psychology experiments investigating this question have been conducted in schools.

Procedure:

Participants were asked to remember a list of 15 words for 45 seconds. They were then asked to wait for 2 minutes, in which they moved location in the experimental condition and sat still in the control condition. Participants then had 30 seconds to write down as many words as they could remember. We ensured participants avoided speaking in this time in order to avoid creating an extraneous variable. Participants were given a set of standardised instructions.

Ethics:

We debriefed participants at the end of the experiment to ensure that they know their results are normal. Before the experiment began, we ensured we had consent forms from all participants which emphasises their right to withdraw from the experiment at any time. Furthermore, we ensured participants understood that their data was being collected for a psychology experiment.

Sampling:

We used opportunity sampling as it was quick and relatively easy to find participants, increasing our sample size. Furthermore, we collected a varied sample of participants – collecting both students and teachers.

Results:

Discussion:

The results show that there is some distinction between where you learn something and a person’s ability to recall information (short-term memory). This proves our hypothesis. It is unlikely that noise functioned as a confounding variable as participants were asked not to talk and we ensured that the rooms (classroom, café, library) were empty or silent spaces. However, our results are not entirely conclusive to supporting our hypothesis, likely due to our limited sample size (10 participants). Thus, more participants are needed in order to draw definite conclusions.

• Louisa A
• George C
• Madeline M