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

Encoding: Getting Information Into Long-Term Memory • 179

Another group of participants also saw four trees, but the words were randomized,

so that each tree contained a random assortment of minerals, animals, clothing, and

transportation. These participants were able to remember only 21 words from all four

trees. Thus, organizing material to be remembered results in substantially better recall.

Perhaps this is something to keep in mind when creating study materials for an exam.

You might, for example, fi nd it useful to organize material you are studying for your

cognitive psychology exam in trees like the one in ● Figure 7.6.

If presenting material in an organized way improves memory, we might expect

that preventing organization from happening would reduce the ability to remem-

ber. Read the passage below and try to fi gure out what it is about, before turning

the page.

If the balloons popped, the sound wouldn’t be able to carry since everything would be too

far away from the correct fl oor. A closed window would also prevent the sound from car-

rying, since most buildings tend to be well insulated. Since the whole operation depends

on the steady fl ow of electricity, a break in the middle of the wire would also cause

problems. Of course, the fellow could shout, but the human voice is not loud enough to

carry that far. An additional problem is that the string could break on the instrument.

Then there would be no accompaniment to the message. It is clear that the best situation

would involve less distance. Then there would be fewer potential problems. With face to

face contact, the least number of things could go wrong. (p. 719)

Minerals

Metals Stones

Aluminum

Copper

Lead

Iron

Bronze

Steel

Brass

Platinum

Silver

Gold

Sapphire

Emerald

Diamond

Ruby

Limestone

Granite

Marble

Slate

Rare Common Alloys Precious Masonry

● FIGURE 7.5 The “organizational tree” for minerals used in Bower et al.’s (1969) experiment

on the eff ect of organization on memory. (Source: G. H. Bower et al., “Hierarchical Retrieval Schemes in

Recall of Categorized Word Lists,” Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 8, Figure 1, 323–343. Copyright ©

1969 Elsevier Ltd. Republished with permission.)

FACTORS THAT AID ENCODING

Create connections

Link to

self

(self-reference

effect)

Imagery

(tree-boat)

Generate

information

Complex

sentences

(chicken

experiment)

Active creation Organization

Testing Recall

by groups

(spontaneous

grouping of

fruits, etc.)

Present

in an

organized

way

(“tree”

experiment)

Meaningful

framework

(balloon

experiment)

● FIGURE 7.6 The organizational tree for some of the material about encoding presented in this section of the chapter.

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