Levels-of-processing effect

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The levels-of-processing effect was first identified by Fergus I. M. Craik and Lockhart in 1972.

The fundamental concept of the levels-of-processing effect, is that different methods of encoding information into memory have different levels of effectiveness, either in their actual writing in, or in their reading back (recall) from memory.

This structure of memory suggests that memory doesn’t have separate levels of storage. This is contrary to views such as the three-store model of memory. Levels-of-Processing considers that there is an infinite number of processing levels of memory being encoded. The levels are indistinct and boundaries between the levels are nonexistent. Under this model, storage is said to be determined by processing. An experiment to support this view is one in which people are given word lists and then asked questions. The questions asked were on a scale of physical, acoustic, or semantic. Results showed that more words were remembered with a deeper question. Also, there was higher recall when the words were connected by logic (fish and ocean), as appose to concretely connected words (fish and hand). Effects such as these are termed the self-reference effect.

Physical- Visual feature of the word (lowercase, uppercase) Acoustic- Sound the word makes (rhyming) Semantic- deeper meaning or function of the word (what the word represents, categories)

The test used to illustrate their hypothesis showed, roughly speaking, that:

Those that hear a passage of text can recall parts of it (audible input)
Those that read a passage of text can recall most of it (visual input)
Those that write down the text can recall most if not all of it, even with the written form taken away (audible or visual input plus physical output)
Those that understand the meaning behind the text will have the strongest ability to recall the passage (conceptual input)

The sliding-scale of increased ability to encode/recall is the focus of the study. Greater processing will lead to greater amounts of information available for recall. Craik and Lockhart postulate depth of processing to fall on a shallow to deep continuum. Shallow processing (e.g., processing words based on their phonemic and orthographic components) leads to a fragile memory trace that is susceptible to rapid decay. Conversely, deep processing (e.g., semantic or meaning based processing) results in a more durable memory trace.

Whether the information is being encoded more effectively or being recalled more effectively is unclear. A typical paradigm employed to investigate the Levels of Processing theory is the incidental learning paradigm. Results reveal superior recall for items processed deeply compared to those items processed at the more shallow level (Eysenck, 1974: Hyde & Jenkins, 1969).

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[edit] References

Eysenck, M.W. (1974). Age differences in incidental learning. Developmental Psychology, 10, 936-941.
Hyde, T.S., & Jenkins, J.J. (1969). Differential effects of incidental tasks on the organization of recall of a list of highly associated words. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 82, 472-481.
Sternberg, R.J. (2006). Cognitive Psychology fourth Edition. Memory, 5, 167-169.