Learning Objectives
- Get acquainted with some different phenomena in memory research.
- Practice aggregating and wrangling data to demonstrate effects of interest.
- Practice creating figures to visualize data.
Materials
- Whiteboard markers and erasers
Overview
This week we are using the topic of memory as the context through which we will practice working with individual and aggregate data.
We will also practice how to visualize data to demonstrate different effects of interest.
Time Allocation
| Introduction | 2 Min |
|---|---|
| Preparing Data | 10 Min |
| Demonstrating Learning | 10 Min |
| Demonstrating Forgetting | 10 Min |
| Examine serial position effects | 10 Min |
| Wrap Up | 3 Min |
| Question Submission | 5 Min |
Introduction (2 Min)
Remind them of the activities they did in preparation for the lab.
Preparing Data (10 Min)
This should not usually take 10 minutes, but some groups may be a bit more confused in how to organize themselves, so we want to give them ample time to communicate and be on the same page for the dataset.
Activity 1: Demonstrating Learning (10 min)
- The objective of this activity is to guide students through the process of identifying how to use the data they have available to demonstrate an effect of interest. As such, don’t give out the answer right away of how to do it, and try to just give them nudges in the right direction.
- They may have some confusion even with seemingly simple things such as aggregating data by averaging across all the members of their group, you may want to give them more explicit help with this if needed.
- Visualization is the most important outcome of this activity, make sure to have them consider thoroughly what to put in each axis of the figure, and what type of plot to use.
Activity 2: Demonstrating Forgetting (10 min)
This will be quite similar to the previous activity, only now they want to focus on the aspect of forgetting. They will correctly probably assume that this is where the delayed recall is most important, but they may be unsure about how to choose which of the immediate recall trials to use for the “before”. Ideally, we would probably want to use the last trial before the delayed recall (trial 5) as we will now try to isolate the effect of the actual “learning” as much as possible.
Nevertheless, don’t tell this to them right away, and try to guide them to answer it for themselves.
Activity 3: Examining Serial Position Effects (10 min)
This one will be one last figure they will make, and perhaps the most immediately challenging. Nevertheless, they should already be somewhat in the swing of things.
Wrap-Up (5 mins)
The focus is in trying to emphasize how carefully designed experiments can often be quite rich and can be used to demonstrate several different interesting phenomena.
Final Submission (5 mins)
Think about one change you could make to the “Word List” experiment you took part in. This change can be for the content of the list, or the way in which the experiment is run. What is your hypothesis for what this change would demonstrate? What would it tell us about how our memory works?