During The Experiment
After seeing the letters they needed to remember, participants were asked to perform this type of task.
What is counting backward by threes?
As the delay increased in the Brown–Peterson experiment, participants generally remembered fewer letters.
What is a decrease in recall over time?
Forgetting occurred quickly in this experiment because participants were unable to keep the letters active in memory.
What is a lack of rehearsal?
The Brown–Peterson experiment helped show that short-term memory does not hold information very well when attention is divided.
What is evidence that short-term memory is fragile?
Participants were specifically required to do this task so they couldn't repeat the letters during the delay.
What is preventing rehearsal?
After only a few seconds of delay, participants forgot a large portion of the letters they had just studied.
What is rapid forgetting in short-term memory?
Recall became worse across repeated trials because earlier letter sets made it harder to remember new ones.
What is earlier information interfering with later recall?
This study helped psychologists understand that remembering information depends on more than just how much time has passed.
What is the role of mental activity during a delay?
During the delay period, participants focused on counting backward rather than the letters, which meant the letters were not being maintained in memory.
What is the distracting task interfering with memory maintenance?
Across repeated trials, recall became worse even when the delay stayed the same.
What is memory performance declining across trials?
Even very short delays led to forgetting when participants were required to perform another mental task.
What is distraction interfering with memory maintenance?
One reason this experiment was important is that it showed how distraction can affect memory in everyday situations like studying or listening.
What is that memory performance is affected by competing tasks?
If participants had not been required to count backward during the delay, their recall of the letters would most likely have improved because they could have done this instead.
What is rehearsing the letters?
The pattern of results shows that short-term memory is especially vulnerable when information is not actively maintained.
What is memory being fragile without active maintenance?
The results show that forgetting in this experiment was not caused by long delays, but by what participants were mentally doing during short delays.
What is interference from the distracting task?
The Brown–Peterson technique played a role in shifting psychology toward studying internal mental processes rather than only observable behavior.
What is support for the cognitive approach?
The delay task used in the Brown–Peterson experiment demonstrates that short-term memory performance depends not just on time, but also on whether this mental process is disrupted.
What is rehearsal?
The overall pattern of recall in the Brown–Peterson experiment suggests that forgetting happens quickly and accumulates across trials, rather than occurring only after long delays.
What is evidence that short-term memory decays rapidly and is affected by previous trials?
The Brown–Peterson findings suggest that short-term forgetting happens when information is not actively maintained and competing mental activity takes over.
What is forgetting caused by disrupted maintenance in working memory?
The findings from this experiment explain why information often fails to move into long-term memory when it is not actively maintained.
What is a lack of rehearsal preventing durable memory formation?