Ambition to travel
This was a research study to determine if college students recalled more information when given auditory or visual cues.
This was a research study to determine if college students recalled more information when given auditory or visual cues.
For this project, I had to work with another student to conduct a research study. We wanted to test to see if students could remember more information if they heard the data or if they saw the data.
When the participants arrived at lab they were given self-report notecards, and then split into Group A and Group B. Group A was first presented to half the students with an auditory recording of 11 letters and numbers on a phone’s voice recorder. Each character was played for approximately 1.2 seconds. After they heard all the characters they were given a 30 second time interval with the stop watch before they were instructed to write down the characters in the order they remembered on their self-report notecards. Group B was given a list of 11 letters, or numbers presented on a power-point for 12 seconds. The participants were then told to remember as many of the characters as they could in the order that they were presented. Following the participants had to wait 30 seconds before they were told to right down their answers. They were then instructed to write down the visual cues that they could remember in the order that they were presented. Following this both groups were given the other cues that they were not previously presented. Group A was given the Visual cues, and Group B was given the Auditory cues.
After testing “if people recall visual cues better than auditory cues after a delayed time interval” we found that our hypothesis of students remembering visual cues more profoundly was correct. For the experiment each was given a ID ranging from 1A to 8B. Using these ID’s, we collected the amount of characters recalled from visual and auditory cues. From the within subject experimental design we found that on average participants remembered 6.06 characters when they were presented with visual cues, and only 4.31 on average when they were presented withauditory cues. The average standard deviation from the mean for visual cues was 2.17. The average standard deviation from the mean for auditory cues was 1.99. Our values from the one tailed t-test was equal to t(15) = -2.53, p = .01. Our p-value of .01 was less than .05 we can conclude that the difference in our means are statistically significant. Since the data was significantly significant it could be inferred that in general people recall visual cues better than they can recall auditory cues
The purpose of our study was to determine if college students learn more efficiently when presented with auditory or visual cues after a delayed time interval. We found that our hypothesis of students remembering visual cues more efficiently and that our data was statistically significant. We also found that our experiment correlated with many of the previous research studies. The experiment conducted by Siegel and Alik (1973) found that visual information’s was stored the most efficiently in the short-term memory. This was like our experiment, but for their experiment their focus was to figure out if the participantsrecalled the information in the correct order better with visual or auditory cues. We didn’t focus on the order in which the participants recorded the characters, we only recorded if they could remember the characters better with auditory or visual cues. Woodworth (2014) also found findings like ours that visual cues are remembered more often than auditory cues in episodic memory recall. Their study was like ours except that they tested to see if auditory stories or visual stories are remembered more profoundly in participants episodic memory, while our experiment tested to see if auditory or visual cues are remembered more efficiently after a delayed time interval. Our results were also like the ones found by Recanzone (2002). His experiment helped researchers to understand that in general people remember information more accurately when presented visual cues than auditory cues, but his experiment focused on precision of the memory recall while ours focused on which cues, auditory or visual, help students remember the most efficiently after a delayed time interval.
Even though the data was significantly significant, there were some discrepancies in our experiment which could have possibly skewed our data. Most of these discrepancies arose from the software applications we used.
Technological Limitations: The main limitation which could have caused biases to arise in our data was with the software programs we were using to conduct the experiment. During our experiment we were limited to using a power point presentation, iPhone timer, and iPhone voice recording. It would have more beneficial to have a computer program which switched through the characters at a specific time interval and replayed the voice recording to limit the experimenter bias.
Confounding variables limitations:In addition to other limitations of the experiment, the students could have different levels of visual and auditory abilities. A few of the students could recall more verbal cues then auditory, which might mean that they have a visual deficit
Solutions:In future experiments we could overcome these limitations by using a software application which could correlate all of materials into one format, so we could ensure that each condition was given to the students or the correct amount of time. We could also could have asked each participant to take a visual or a hearing examination prior to having them do the experiment to limit theses confounding variables.
From our studies we have found that on average students remember information from visual cues more efficiently then auditory cues. These findings can help students study habits by giving them proof that if they read their class material visually, then they would be able to recall the information more efficiently than if they just listen to their professor lecture. These finding are also important because they can be applied to professors teaching styles to help their students remember information more efficiently. If a professor was having issues with their students remembering class material from a lecture then they could use more visual cues such as written or typed explanations, instead of just lecturing their classes verbally.