Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Author

Wei Chu

Date

2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

Psychology

Committee Chair

Philip Pavlik

Committee Member

Andrew Olney

Committee Member

Jeffrey Berman

Committee Member

Xiangen Hu

Abstract

Memory retention and forgetting are two interdependent aspects of the same cognitive phenomenon. To decelerate forgetting and improve long-term retention, researchers have investigated the effects of encoding factors such as the degree of initial learning and the meaningfulness of materials. However, these studies have yielded mixed results mainly due to varying preferences in the operationalization of forgetting rate. The present study investigated the impacts of both factors on forgetting rates and long-term retention in a paired associates learning context. Specifically, analysis of variance (e.g., ANOVA and GLMM) and modeling methods (e.g., power, exponential, and logarithmic forgetting functions) were employed to explore these effects comprehensively. A mixed factorial experiment was designed: the degree of initial learning was a within-participant factor with three levels (low, medium, and high), meaningfulness was a between-participant factor with two levels (low versus high), and four retention intervals (35 seconds, 1 hour, 1 day, and 3 days.) were employed as another betweenparticipant factor to measure learners’ retention performance and fit forgetting curves. The results indicated that noun-noun pairs with high meaningfulness exhibit superior long-term retention performance, a slower absolute rate of forgetting, and a slower relative rate of forgetting. In contrast, while a higher degree of initial learning led to better long-term performance, it did not significantly reduce the rate of forgetting, supporting the independence hypothesis regarding the initial learning degree and forgetting rate. Additionally, both power and logarithmic functions effectively model the nonlinear patterns of forgetting with fewer degrees of freedom.

Comments

Data is provided by the student.

Library Comment

Dissertation or thesis originally submitted to ProQuest.

Notes

Open access.

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