ebbinghaus experiment
...oups (Becca Fincher-Kiefer, 1999, experiment2). The third experiment demonstrated the buildup and release of proactive interference in the classic Brown-Peterson paradigm. For this experiment, divide subjects into four groups. One group of participants will receive only letter trigrams, and one will receive only number trigrams. For the remaining participants, one group will receive letters for the first three trials and numbers on the fourth, and the other group will receive numbers for the first three trials and letters on the fourth and see the difference among groups (Becca Fincher-Kiefer, 1999, experiment3). The purpose of this study is to replicate the Ebbinghaus experiment using 15subjects. Method In our replication of Ebbinghaus experiment 15 subjects were tested. 8 of tested subjects were male and 7 of them were female. There were 2 high school graduate, 12 were in undergraduate, and 2 were graduate students. Subjects were selected from among friends and family members of the researchers. We prepared a list of 19 nonsense syllables, similar to those used by Ebbinghaus, were used. Nonsense syllables eliminate the influence of previous learning. Time limit to memorize the words was 20 minutes and gave each tester 3 minutes to write down whatever he or she remembered. The results were tabulated. Results Figure 1 shows the number of items on the list that subjects recalled. More subjects remembered items from the beginning and the end of the list than those from the middle. The results support Ebbinghaus’ (1885) conclusions. Discussion As Ebbinghaus’ experiment showed, the subjects could recall more words from the beginning and the end of the list. The surroundings of this experiment were mostly atrium, which was crowded and noisy. We had some difficulty with testers who they couldn’t concentrate on the task. We didn’t consider this bias when we were planning the experiment. The total numbers of remembered words per person was 5, 6 words, which is not too low, if the circumstances are considered. But I think better results would come out if the environment of the experiment was better. There were couple words from the list that sounded similar to some Korean words; most of the testers were Korean. BOK sounded like a word that means fortune in Korean. That might have been the fact there were a few more testers that re...