What He Never Forgot

Immediate (1) An hour later (2) = What he remembered

Paper, 1

Seat, 1

Tire, 1

Love, 1 2

Beach, 1  2

Analysis,1

conjunction, 1 2

brush,

chairman, 1

accurate,

woods,

green,

hunger,

gift,

keyboard,

number, 1

bottle,

jogging,

wheel, 1

system

My subject did not know that he was going to have to recall these words an hour later so he did not use any mnemonic method in order to remember these words. If he had thought of a rhyme or an image location for these words he would have done better.  I asked the subject what his strategy was for remembering the words and he told me that he repeated the word over and over again (repetition), which has been proved not to work as well as other mnemonic methods such as the ones I mentioned above. My subject may be production deficient! However maybe we should give him a break because as time increases so does forgetting. Did he forget the words???? He was doing maintenance rehearsal so once he stopped doing this, the words vanished. I am going to have to say that these words were never stored in long term memory in the first place. However, when I told him after the experiment what the words were that he remembered in the immediate recall he said “oh yeah I remember those” but he didn’t remember the words he couldn’t immediately recall at all. His performance shows that he did not process these words very deeply and some he didnt process at all! One could also say that it was a failure of retrieval but some of the words were never stored in his long term memory, so can we say that he forgot? Not really because he never stored the words in the first place so he cant forget something he never stored.