Effect of Color and Word Length on Memory Performance

Effect of Color and Word Length on Memory Performance nonobjectiveThe purpose of this drive was to examine the effect of wile and phrase length on keeping performance. Seventy nine undergraduatecollege students from Disted college, aged from 19 to 23 of both male and female genders were recruited for the study. The studywas a 32 combine order design, There be two independent vari sufficients in this sample which are word length and colors of language, bit the dependent variable is memory performance. Results showed that there was no signifi send wordt change in aslant haggling onmemory performance, while varietys in word length showed a significant increase in memory performance. The results supportedour secondary hypothesis which claimed that participants were more able to suppose shorter words than grander words. On thecontrary, our primary hypothesis was not supported. In conclusion, word length may shed a positive repair on memory performance.IntroductionIt is com mon knowledge that we humans are more attracted to colorful objects like pictures or sour films than black andwhite colors. It is as well as well known that young children, especially babies and toddlers are particularly attracted to shinny and strikingcolors. Such instances may have piqued the curiosity of scholars in the old geezerhood to answer the question why people are moreattracted to colorful stimulus, sadly for the scholars the capacity to study this topic is not readily available until young times. Sinceancient antiquity, colors on clothes not only do people look more distinct from 1 another, reliable colors in any case inspire awe andshows status and power. For example, in the east Chinese emperors have always wore gold color to signify their status as son ofheaven, while in the west Roman emperors and the aristocrats wear purple so show their status in society.In todays society, an individual in the academic field is expected to be able to do many tasks, one of the most beta skills inour society is to be able to remember important things. For example, in college we constantly need to remember important termsandwords, these cultivation that we have learned is to be tested in quizzes and exams. College students that do not have goodattention focus and memory are looked down upon by their lecturers and peers beca hold they mostly under perform in their academicperformance. Fortunately for this type of college students, as time progress more efficient methods of studying and memorizing isbeing discove flushed or proposed. One of these methods is mind mapping, the method of mind mapping basically uses the in effect(p) side(color and creativity) together with the left side (words and logic) of the brain to increase memory performance (Astrid, n.d).As such, it can be seen that both color and words could be essential component in memory performance. Working together,both aspects could be used to aid or test the performance of a students memory capability. connatural to mind maps, word length anddifferent kind of colors could affect the overall memory performance.Theoretical FrameworkThe human mind has a actually complicated way of processing and memorizing tuition. Among the many theories thatattempted to explain how memory works, Baddeleys working memory model seemed to provide one of the best explanations. Thismodel was created by Baddely and Hitch to improve upon the rather obsolete multi- repositing model, they argued that the multi-storemodel was too simplified. Their working memory model seeks to explain that short term memory has components/subsystems thatactively manipulates information that it receives (Miyake Shah, 1999). The model has four important components which were theCentral Executive, Visuo-Spatial Sketchpad, phonological loop and Episodic Buffer. They further elaborated that workingmemory was made up of the central executive which controls the operation of two subsystems the phonological loop and t he visuo-spatial sketch pad. The final component, episodic buffer was meant to be a back up store that connects working memory with longterm memory (McLeod, 2008).The working memory model relates to color and word length collectible to the visuo-spatial sketchpad and the phonological loop. Thevisuo-spatial sketchpad stores visual information such as word shapes and colors for a short period of time (Logie, 2002). Ourworking memory was very centre on color be causal agent colored objects of an items leaves a deeper impression on our memory(Cercone Learning, n.d). While, some people tend to recall words better when they pronounce it while memorizing, their ability torecall is stirred by the word length, which is stored in the phonological loop (Logie, 2002).Past LiteratureAs time goes by more and more past enquiry was made to address the issue of colored words and word length on memoryperformance. Although most look into only investigated on colored words and memory performance or word length on memoryperformance, their contribution were highly regarded. One such study was made by Mustafar Dzulkifli (2013), their study wasfocused on investigating the effect of ground color on memory performance. In their study, they invited 90 undergraduate students ,age ranges from 19 to 22 to participate in the test. They conducted their experiment by using between group design, therewas three groups of participant that were habituated different treatments. The first group was inclined red colored background slides, whilethe second group was given background slides with no color. The third group was be given background slides that have a combination of color and no-color background to be shown alternately. Their research results ensnare that most shape with coloredbackground will be recalled better than shape with non-color background.another(prenominal) research was made by Campoy (2008) which was made to investigate the effect of word length in short-term memory.T he research invited 50 undergraduate university students. The research was conducted by using two participants in each session intwo different sound-attenuated booths. In the booths the computers shows a stimulus (five-word series study list) presented in blockletter at the rate 300 ms per word. After a delay 3,000 ms, the second sequence (test list) was shown in lower case at the samespeed. Lastly, a question mark was revealed and the participants will press key 1 or 2 when they decided the word orders in bothseries were different or same. Results revealed that a list of short four-phoneme words were better remembered than a lists of longsix-phoneme words.Among the many past research, there was one research that stands out the most. Research make by Le Castillo (2009) wasmeant to investigate on the effects of color and word length on verbal working memory. In this research, 61 business professionalswere invited to participate. The research was conducted by first requesting partic ipants to memorize short words (12 seconds) andlong words (30 seconds), accordingly participants were requested to recall short words within 24 seconds and long words within 60seconds. Participants was then asked to do demographic questionnaires and allow in them together with their answer papers. Theresults showed that five-syllable words were the most hard to remember, with memory performance difference much more obviousbetween Caucasians and none-Caucasians.Description of StudyIn this study, we were much different compared to past studies because we focused on both length of words and color of words,as stated in our ERB (refer to Appendix D) Compared to past research like the one done by Huchendorf who mainly focuses on theeffects of color on memory or the one done by Neath Naire that was focused on word length and short term memory, ours weremore complex and in-dept because we break both aspects. Among the many studies that was made, our experiment mostresembles the one by L e Castillo. In Le Castillo, one of the main aspects they investigated was the capacity of memory amongsixty one business professionals. Compared to their experiment, our experiment not only was focused on a different sample, whichisthe college student sample, we also have a larger amount of participants which provides us a greater variety of culturalbackgroundand memory capability.The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of color and word length on memory performance. Our experiment wasconducted by separating all our participants into two equally large sized group, then the participants were directed to the short wordor long word experiment style to do the experiment. In the ways the participants were given one hour to attempt to memorize asmany words as they can and then given another minute to recall and write down the words they can remember, participants werethengiven one minute to sang-froid down and rest before runing the next treatment. In our experiment, w e outlined two hypothesis thatwaswritten in our ERB. Based on past research by Huchendorf (2007), Le Castillo (2009) and Neath Naire (1995), wehypothesized that unassailable colored words is easier to remember than cool colored words and shorter word length is easier to beremembered than longer word length.Practical Implication of StudyAn implication of this study was that the finding could be used in class styles to assist teachers and lecturers in guidingstudents. Teachers can use this knowledge to teach students on doing mind maps and teach them to use highlighters to highlightcertain words, the highlighted words will increase the capability of a students memory.MethodsDesignThe experiment was an experimental type research design that was meant to investigate the cause and effect of theindependent and dependent variable. The research have two independent variables and three levels. The independent variableswere words length (single syllable/three syllables) and color of the w ords (black), warm color (red) and the cool color (green). Thedependent variable was using memory performance of number of correct words recalled. Also, the research is a 32 mixed methoddesign, the reason the research was using mixed method was because the design contained elements from between and withinsubject.ParticipantsThere was approximately seventy nine participants that came from different races, the participants were also recruited from themany different courses of Disted college. Their age range was between 19 and 23 years old while their gender was both male andfemale. The students participated the experiment due to their own willingness and initiative. Furthermore, experimenters hadrequested permission from the DISTED Student council to obtain lecture schedules to see which class was available andpermissionfrom individual lecturers to recruit students. The participants was recruited through random sampling method theexperimenters had approached students around DISTED co llege cafeteria, library and pre-selected classes.MaterialThe experiment had used two computers and two projectors to depict the different colored and worded experiment slides,another material was the computer packet Microsoft power point, specifically the slides was made using the software. The twentywords from each of the color worded slides (refer to Appendix B) are retrieved from MRC Psycholinguistic Database, University ofWestern Australia, School of Psychology. Other materials include SPSS program to calculate the results output (refer to AppendixC)and smart phone built in stop watches that was used to time the experiment sessions (timing one minute for memorizing words orone minute to recall the list of words).ProcedureThe study was conducted in two classrooms each equipped with a projector, the experiment was conducted across several(prenominal)sessions with a random amount of participants in each session. The participants were first given a brief explanation about the natu reand purpose of the experiment and then the experimenters requested the participants to sign the consent form (refer to Appendix A).Next, each participant was randomly assigned by counting one and two, it is arranged like that so that both groups would be equal innumber .The first group was asked to remain in the current room, while the second group was brought to the other room by one of theexperimenters. Also, the first group was given a list of shorter words (one syllable) with three different colored treatments controlcolor (black) ,warm color (red) and cool color (green). Similar to the first group, the second group was given the same treatment,except that the word length was longer (three syllables).The experiment was started when participants were given one minute to remember a list of black colored words from theprojected slides on screen and another 1 minute to write it down on the paper, after that the participants were given one minute tocool down. Once the participants were ready for the next treatment, the participants was given one minute to remember a list of redcolored words and then another minute to write it down, then the participants were given another minute to cool down before the lasttreatment. Finally, the participants was given other minute to remember a list of green colored words and one minute to write it down.Once all the words that can be recalled was written down, the experimenters collected the papers from the participants and theparticipants were dismissed.DiscussionAs seen in the results section written above, our experiments outcome concluded that color of words generally do not affectmemory performance. However, our results also showed that disregarding the length of words, colored words have significantrelationship with memory performance. On the other hand, word length has a positively significant relationship with memoryperformance. Among our two hypotheses, the word length and memory performance hypothesis was highly s upported by our results.More specifically, our hypothesis that mentioned short words were more easily remembered than longer words.The results of our study was consistent and supported by past literature, research findings by Campoy (2008) and Le Castillo(2009) were two such examples. Their research results had shown that people give it easier to remember words with less syllablesor phonemes. The consensus between the two past literature and our experiment was that, lesser amount of syllables allowedworking memory to process information faster and more efficiently. However, our experiment was not supported by Mustafar Dzulkifli (2013). Their results did not coincide with our results on color, they found that shapes with colored background was recalledbetter than shape with non-color background. A possible reason on why our results was not the same as some past research wasbecause, we focused our experiment on both color and word length, instead of just one of it.It should be ackno wledged that there was one failed manipulations in our experiment, that particular failure was our coloredwordmanipulation, it is due to this reason that our first hypothesis failed. Also, there was a few at odds(p) variables that might haveaffected the experiment. One of the confounding variable was the experiments starting time, the experimenters had noted that therewere some inaccuracies on the timing of some experiment sessions. Another reason was due to the hour we conducted ourexperiment. For example, we conducted our experiment on late afternoon, it could be that most participants were weary, fatiguedandfrustrated after a long day in class, such distractions would leave the participants less capable to focus on our experiment. Thethird confounding variable was due to temperature, one of the rooms was rather cold while the other was rather warm, it should benoted that the differences in room temperature could affect the performance of the participants. In order to solve these problems, theexperimenters had taken steps such as adjusting the airconditiong of both rooms to be the same and set timers to start theexperiments simultaneously.Throughout our experiment, we realized certain important things that would prove beneficial for future studies. Experimentsmade in future could be improved upon by gathering a larger amount of participants from different age, race and background, doingso would have given the future experimenters a better represented result based on a more diverse data. Future experiments couldalso be improved by using culturally neutral words, the usage of such words would have allowed certain participants to perform betterwithout a cultural word barrier. Another suggestion was that future experiments could have done their experiments earlier, this issuggested so that the participants would be able to do the experiment on their peaked performance.The implication of this study was that it would benefit any individual that is in the academic world or the business world. Astudentwould have found this experiment helpful because our results would have assisted them in their academic performance. Ourexperiment results would have shown them that making short notes would have made them more efficient in their studies. Teachersand lecturers could also use our experiment results to form a more effective study materials, study materials that are shorter andsimpler would be more effective for a students studies. Another benefit was that advertising corporations could have used ourexperiment results to assist them in creating an attractive and memorable advertisement in the minds of consumers.As a final conclusion, this study was conducted to investigate the relationship between word length, word color and memoryperformance. The findings showed that participants found it easier to remember words that are shorter and more warm colored orlonger words with cooler color. Further studies should be conducted with a larger sample popula tion.