Analysis of George A. Miller´s Chunking Research Study

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 Introduction
Since 1950s, the concept of chunking has continued to fascinate psychologists as it appears to have important operations of cognition in which offering guides to explore more about the fundamental cognitive processes of the brain. The concept of chunking was first introduced by Harvard psychologist, George A. Miller who studied the capabilities of human short term memory by conducting an experiment that resulted in the typical storage holding capacity for short-term memory is seven plus or minus two items. He also discovered that a process of coding information into larger chunks can significantly enhance the words one can remember and recall.
The aim of replicating and modifying this study is to compare the number of words memorized by a group of participants who used a list of random words versus a group of participants who used a list of related words.

 Methodology o Design
The design was a laboratory experiment, which allows the experimenter to establish a cause-effect relationship between the independent and the dependent variable.
The independent variable (IV) was the use of the different list of words; random words vs related words. The dependent variable (DV) was the different number of words and the operationalisation of variables was the number of words recalled from the two different word lists.
The control group was the group given a list of 20 random words and the experiment group was the group given a list of 20 related words. Random group allocation of participants to both of the two conditions was used to counter-balance the individual differences of the participants.
In order to follow the ethical considerations, experimenter informed all the participants that they have the right to withdraw...

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The ethical guidelines were followed because experimenter did not harm any humans nor animals.

 Materials o Consent form o Debriefing form o Powerpoint presentation o Picture of a list of random words o Stopwatch

 Results
It was hypothesized that the group of participants who used a list of random words would more likely to remember fewer words compare to the group of participants who used a list of related words and results in the data table below confirmed the hypothesis to be true. In figure 1, the mean is used to be a summary statistic that shows where the centre of the datasets; list of random words, list of related words and number of words recalled. Whereas the standard deviation is the measure of central tendency and gives a better picture of the data. The smaller the value of standard deviation, the greater the data concentrated around the mean.

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