Investigating short-term memory

This report describes the experiment conducted by Solarz (2023) to examine the
concept of short-term memory. University students were proposed to memorise a
list of words. It has been found that students tend to recall the words mainly from
the beginning of the list.

14 participants (13 women and 1 man) took part in the experiment. They were
asked to look at a list of 20 words for a minute and then to try to recall them as
many as possible. Students wrote down recalled words to find the correlation
between the best memorised words and their position on the list.

The results showed that students were more likely to recall words from the
beginning of the list and fewer words from the middle and the end of the list. Also
the average amount of recalled words was 8, and only one student managed to
recall 16 of them.

The results proved that students studied the first words more carefully so they
probably had been processed enough to enter the long-term memory. The words
from the end of the list which were supposed to be stored in the short-term
memory were hardly recalled by the students, which could probably mean that our
group has weak short-term memory.

It can be concluded that we are more likely to remember the first items of given
information as our brains are more attentive at the beginning of memorising it.
Also the experiment should be conducted several times in order to get more
accurate results so we cannot rely on the given results.