The Research On Separation Of Item Memory And Order Memory

As the constantly in-depth exploration on working memory by researchers, item memory and order memory research project has become one of the popular fields of concern. The previous studies mainly compare the separation effects of different materials on item information and order information through traditional methods.Nairne and Kelley(2004) discovered measuring shortcomings of traditional methods and then proposed a new technology, process dissociation method,to obtain non-contaminated estimate of item memory and order memory. Therefore, this paper will explored whether the process separation method has a higher purity than the traditional methods.In the first study, we explored the separation effect of phonological similarity on item memory and order memory by process dissociation method and traditional method,then tested whether process dissociation has higher measuring purity by comparing these two methods. The first study includes two experiments: Experiment 1 examined separation effect of the Chinese phonological similarity on item information and order information by traditional methods, namely free recall and reconstruction task,.Experiment 2 explored the same effect by process dissociation method. Then we compared internal relationship of the estimation values of two methods to determine which method has the higher purity on measurement. The results showed that phonological similarity increases the item memory and impairs the order memory in traditional method, while it has no influence on item information but impairs the order information in process dissociation method. Process dissociation method did not exhibit higher purity on measurement.The aim of the second study is to explore the separation effect of semantic similarity on item memory and order memory by process dissociation method and traditional method,and to test whether the separation process has higher purity on measurement by comparing two methods. The second study includes two experiments: Experiment 3used traditional methods, free recall and reconstruction task, to explore the separation effect of the Chinese semantic similarity on item information and order information.Experiment 4 explored same effect by using the process dissociation method. Then we compared internal relationship of the estimation values of two methods, to determinewhich method has the higher purity on measurement. The results showed that semantic similarity increases item information but impairs the order information in traditional method, while it increases item information but no influence on order information in process dissociation method. Process dissociation method exhibited higher purity on measurement.Combining the results of study I and study II, we compared the separation effects of different experimental materials on item memory and order memory, and the final conclusion is that the process dissociation method has higher purity than the conventional method on measurement when used semantic similarity material.