Working Memory Updating using Meaningful Trigraphs
Christopher William Gamsby · OhioLink ETD Center (Ohio Library and Information Network) · 2016
This thesis tested whether using meaningful trigraphs in the three letter memorization paradigm used by Ecker, Oberauer, and Lewandowsky (2014) changed the nature of working memory update.Participants were undergraduate students from a mid-sized midwestern US university.The results replicated Ecker, Oberauer, and Lewandowsky's findings in all conditions where participants memorized a non-meaningful trigraph (memorizing a trigraph that was one letter different than the previous trigraph was significantly faster than memorizing a trigraph with two changes and memorizing a trigraph with three changes was faster than making two changes but slower than one change).Compared to the control condition there was a compression of reaction times in the meaningful condition.Two and three changes were significantly faster in the meaningful condition compared to the not meaningful condition (p < .05)and one change was non-significantly slower (p = .19).There was no main effect of direction of changes (p = .18).The inclusion of meaningful trigraphs did not appear to change the pattern of working memory update, as might be predicted by a serial updating paradigm.Possible explanations and future research directions are discussed in the discussion.