Craik & Tulving wanted to test whether the
level of processing affected how well we remember information. By "depth
of processing", we mean, the way in which a person thinks about a piece
of information, for example, a shallow level of processing of a word would be
to skim over a sentence and to understand the sentence without dwelling on the
individual word. In this way, we have processed the meaning of the word, but
only in order to understand the sentence. A deeper level of processing, on the
other hand, would be to look at the word by itself, outside of a sentence, and
to think of what the word means; maybe even what other words rhyme with it.
This way, we are also more likely to remember it.
How Craik & Tulving set out to test level of processing
In 1975, the researchers conducted an experiment in which
participants were shown a list of 60 words.
They were then asked to recall certain words by being shown
one of three questions, each testing a different level of processing, similar
to:
Was the word in capital letters or lower case? (Tests
structural processing SHALLOW PROCESSING)
Does the word rhyme with (another word)? (Tests phonemic/auditory
processing, as the participant has to listen to the word judge whether it
rhymes with another word)
Does the word fit in the following sentence...? (Tests
semantic processing; understanding the meaning of the word
DEEP PROCESSING/ ELABORATE REHERSAL)
Out of another larger list, the
participants were asked to pick out the appropriate word, as the original words
had been mixed into this list.
Findings
Craik & Tulving found that participants were better
able to recall words which had been processed more deeply - that is, processed
semantically, supporting level of processing theory.
Evaluation of this experiment
Supports level of processing theory
As deeper processing would logically
take more time to execute than shallow processing (e.g. thinking of words
that rhyme with a word vs. noticing whether a word is capitalized), it
is unclear whether time taken to process, or level
of processing is the actual cause of recall.
Craik & Tulving's experiment lacks
a degree of ecological validity in that only word recall is tested. In
reality whereas structural and visual processing might be expected to
higher if a person had been asked to recall a picture they had seen, for
example.
