The Impact Of Material Familiarity On Working Memory, Strategy And Memorizing Effect

Memory is very important in our lives. We couldn’t work or live without memories. At the same time, strategy use could have an great impact on memory. So a lot studies have been done to reveal the relationship between memory and strategy use. While the material familiarity is one of the important properties of the material, we assume that the material familiarity will have impact on strategy use and memorizing effects. But the familiarity of material was not paid enough attention on. So we intend to discovery the relationship between familiarity of material and memorizing strategy use in this study.Before the start of the experiment, we had the familiarity of selected 400 pairs of Chinese characters words rated. These Chinese characters words are selected from the common categories, such as country names, plants, transportation and so on. Select high familiarity vocabulary or low familiarity from the assessment results as the experimental materials of follow-up study. The follow-up study included two experiments:Experiment 1: The experiment is a two- level within subjects design. The independent variables are the familiarity of the vocabulary, which divided into familiar group and unfamiliar group. The dependent variable is working memory span. This Experiment uses an adaptation of the Turner and Engle formula- word paradigm. The results showed that: participants showed larger working memory span in the familiar vocabulary test and smaller working memory span in the unfamiliar vocabulary test. The material familiarity has a significant effect on the working memory span.Experiment 2: This experiment is two- level within subjects designs as well. Dependent variable is the score in free recall performance. Through the observation in the process of experiment, interview and fractional conversion method, the subjects’ use of memory strategies is recorded. The results showed that participants scored better in the familiar vocabulary test than in the unfamiliar vocabulary test; there are differences between the large/small working memory span groups, the larger working memory span is, the better performing in the free recall tests; material familiarity and working memory span have impacts on the use of memory strategy, the larger working memory span and the more familiar with the material, the higher the level of memory strategy use.In this study, we make the material familiarity a method to control the difficulty of memory material, so that the memory material is in the same level of difficulty for different subjects. It has an important effect on working memory, the selection of memory strategy and the memorizing effect. In addition, this study explores the effect of material on the use of memory strategy which is of great value for revealing the development of memory strategy, the change of memory strategy and the influence factors.