Cognitive Psychology: Connecting Mind, Research and Everyday Experience, 3rd Edition

Encoding: Getting Information Into Long-Term Memory • 175

lowercase or capital letters, or the number of vowels in a word, as was done in Part 1 of

the “Remembering Lists” demonstration. Shallow processing also occurs during mainte-

nance rehearsal, in which an item is repeated to keep it in memory but without consider-

ing its meaning or its connection with anything else.

Deep processing involves close attention, focusing on an item’s meaning and relat-

ing it to something else. Considering how an item might be useful in a particular situ-

ation, as was done in Part 2 of the demonstration, or creating an image of the item

in relation to another item would create deep processing. This way of processing an

item occurs during elaborative rehearsal and, according to levels-of-processing theory,

results in better memory than shallow processing.

The previous demonstration illustrated one way of varying depth of processing.

The following Method, which corresponds to the method used in an experiment by

Fergus Craik and Endel Tulving (1975), illustrates how depth of processing can be var-

ied by asking different kinds of questions about a word.

METHOD Varying Depth of Processing

The procedure for the Craik and Tulving experiment is diagrammed in ● Figure 7.1a. A question

was presented, followed by a word, and then the participant responded. Shallow processing was

achieved by asking questions about the word’s physical characteristics; deeper processing was

achieved by asking about the word’s sound; and the deepest processing was achieved by a task

that involved the word’s meaning. The following examples are similar to those used in Craik and

Tulving’s experiment.

1. Shallow processing: A question about physical features of the word
   Question: Is the word printed in capital letters?
   Word: bird


2. Deeper processing: A question about rhyming
   Question: Does the word rhyme with train?
   Word: pain


3. Deepest processing: A fill-in-the-blanks question
   Question: Does the word fi t into the sentence “He saw a on the street”?
   Word: car
   After participants responded to questions like
   the ones above, they were given a memory test to
   see how well they recalled the words. The results,
   shown in Figure 7.1b, indicate that deeper processing
   is associated with better memory.

The idea of levels of processing motivated

a great deal of research that investigated how

the way a stimulus is encoded affects the abil-

ity to retrieve it later. However, the levels-of-

processing theory and the idea of depth of

processing became less important to memory

researchers when it became apparent that it

was diffi cult to defi ne exactly what depth of

processing is.

The Diffi culty in Defi ning Depth of Processing

The way we have described depth of process-

ing is based mainly on common sense: It seems

obvious that paying attention to how a word

is used in a sentence would be “deeper” than

(a)

Ask question.

Example:

Capital letters?

Present

word.

Example: Bird

Answer

question.

Example: No

(b)

Fill in

blanks

Rhyme?

100

50

Percent correct 0

Capital

letters?

● FIGURE 7.1 (a) Sequence of events in Craik and Tulving’s (1975)
experiment. (b) Results of this experiment. Deeper processing (fi ll-in-the-
blanks question) is associated with better memory.

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