THE RELATION BETWEEN MEMORY FOR WORDS AND
MEMORY FOR NUMBERS, AND THE RELATION
BETWEEN MEMORY OVER SHORT AND MEM-
ORY OVER LONG INTERVALS.
By Edward L. Thorndike, Teachers College, Columbia University.
Measurements of mental relationships are so important and so scanty that I venture to report certain ones in the case of memory, although they are by no means satisfactory with respect to method. They will not, however, be misleading to any one who bears in mind their limitations.
The measurements are of the relations in educate'd adults:–(1) between (a) the ability to remember a list of twelve words from a single hearing, at a rate of approximately one per second, long enough to write them immediately at the close of the reading; and (b) the same ability in the case of a list of five three-place numbers. There were five lists of (a) and five lists of (b). (2) Between: (a) and (c) the ability to remember the sixty words given in the five tests of (a) twenty-four hours later.
No requirements were made as to the order except, of course, that the order of the digits within each three-place number must be correct. The basis of the memory of (c) was not only the single hearing, and the experience of writing down such words as the individual remembered, but also the experience of scoring one's results from a complete list given to the individual for that purpose.
(1) and (2) do not, that is, measure the relationships in general, but the relationships as influenced by the restriction of the tests to one half-hour in the case of (1) and (2) and the relationship as influenced by the variations in the degree of attention given to the words in scoring results in the case of (2). Moreover, I have not corrected the results for spurious correlation due to sex, nor for attenuation due to the small number of tests.
The lists used and the method of scoring were as follows: The number of individuals was 38 for relation i and 40 for relation 2.
The lists of words used were:
near
out
false
lot
gift
end
cheat
thought
lose
add
queer
full
bell
cloud
box
slate
cap
wing
flag
bed
stone
Pig
house
nose
break
call
sleep
drop
smile
run
eat
cry
drink
hit
sing
skip
maze
cress
hob
zest
eke
slink
fob
lush
elk
bland
tweak
lilt
yet
shall
and
lest
how
could
though
when
let
your
since
more
The lists of numbers used were:
791
469
254
624
639
716
948
851
579
356
