Nonsense and droodles
Meaning has a major influence on memory. Ebbinghaus (1964/ 1885) recognized that the study of material which already had meaning for the learner would be influenced by that meaning. So it seemed to Ebbinghaus that if he was to discover the fundamental principles of memory, then he would need to study the learning of simple, systematically constructed materials. He created syllables by stringing together a consonant sound, a vowel sound and a consonant sound. Some of these were words or meaningful parts of words but most were simply syllables. He made lists of these syllables and learned them in order – often requiring many trials to learn them perfectly. In contrast to his experience learning poetry, learning these syllables was slow. A demonstration of the importance of meaning for the recall of very different material was provided by Bower, Karlin and Dueck (1975). They studied memory for droodles – simple line drawings of nonsense pictures. Some participants were given a meaning for each droodle (e.g. a mi get playing a trombone in a telephone booth; an early bird who caught a very strong worm). These individuals were able to sketch the pictures from memory far better (70 per cent correct) than participants who were not given these meanings (51 per cent correct).
Meaning has a major influence on memory. Ebbinghaus (1964/ 1885) recognized that the study of material which already had meaning for the learner would be influenced by that meaning. So it seemed to Ebbinghaus that if he was to discover the fundamental principles of memory, then he would need to study the learning of simple, systematically constructed materials. He created syllables by stringing together a consonant sound, a vowel sound and a consonant sound. Some of these were words or meaningful parts of words but most were simply syllables. He made lists of these syllables and learned them in order – often requiring many trials to learn them perfectly. In contrast to his experience learning poetry, learning these syllables was slow. A demonstration of the importance of meaning for the recall of very different material was provided by Bower, Karlin and Dueck (1975). They studied memory for droodles – simple line drawings of nonsense pictures. Some participants were given a meaning for each droodle (e.g. a mi get playing a trombone in a telephone booth; an early bird who caught a very strong worm). These individuals were able to sketch the pictures from memory far better (70 per cent correct) than participants who were not given these meanings (51 per cent correct).
No comments:
Post a Comment