Week 7 · Assignment: Traditional alternative (no AI)

Week 7 — Rebuilt, Not Replayed: A Memory Brief — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Introduction to Psychology Free sample edition

Traditional alternative (no AI), unpublished. In the course this is a separate assignment that ships unpublished beside the adaptive assignment: same objective, no AI. An instructor who prefers it publishes it and unpublishes or deletes the adaptive one, as the note at its top says.

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 7 of the term — read Ebbinghaus's forgetting curve and Loftus & Palmer's verb experiment as numbers, explain what each one shows about how memory works, and tell a friend who is about to give a witness statement why a sure memory can still be wrong.

This week you learned to follow a memory through encoding, storage, and retrieval, to read Ebbinghaus's forgetting curve, and to explain why recall rebuilds a memory instead of replaying it. In Week 2 you met both of this week's studies as models of method; here you use them to explain memory itself. In this assignment you work two short problems on those classic studies, interpret each one, and explain to a friend why a sure memory can still be wrong. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Analysis Workshop practise the same ideas from other angles.

The task

Ebbinghaus (1885) measured memory as percent savings on relearning: how much less time relearning a list took than learning it the first time. Loftus & Palmer (1974) asked students how fast two cars were going when they hit each other, changing only the verb in the question, and then measured the speed each group estimated.

Work these two problems, showing your arithmetic:

Ebbinghaus (1885) measured memory as percent savings on relearning. Savings were 58.2% after 19 minutes and 21.1% after 31 days. How many percentage points did savings fall from 19 minutes to 31 days?
In Loftus & Palmer (1974) Experiment 1, students who heard the verb smashed estimated an average speed of 40.8 mph, and students who heard the verb contacted estimated an average of 31.8 mph. How many miles per hour higher was the smashed average?

Beside each answer, add one brief interpretation. For problem 1, explain what percent savings measures and why it can catch memory you cannot recall, describe the shape of the forgetting curve (where most of the loss happens), and name one limit of Ebbinghaus's method. For problem 2, name the independent variable and the dependent variable, explain why random assignment lets the study say the wording changed the estimate, and connect the result to reconstructive memory and the misinformation effect.

Show your arithmetic. A reader should be able to reproduce every number you report from the values above without guessing which values or steps you used.

Explain it to a non-expert

A friend saw a minor fender-bender in a grocery-store parking lot and is about to give a statement to an insurance adjuster. The friend says, "I'm sure the car was speeding, so I'll be right." Write a 3–5 sentence message that explains, in everyday words, why the way a question is worded can change what a person remembers, and why feeling sure is not the same as being right. Name one limit, such as how a laboratory film differs from a real event. Explain any technical term in everyday words.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a coworker who asks why they keep typing their old password after it was changed. Model answer: "Your old password isn't gone; it's getting in the way. When something you learned earlier blocks something you learned later, psychologists call it proactive interference. The more you use the new password, the less the old one will pop up. Some people take longer than others to make the switch, so a few slips in the first week are normal."

Use that pattern for your friend, with your own explanation and evidence.

Deliverables

Submit a single memory brief containing:

the two answers, each with the arithmetic shown and a brief interpretation as described in the task;
your message to your friend, explaining in everyday words why question wording can change a memory, why feeling sure is not the same as being right, and one limit; and
a one-line restatement of the values you used, so your results are reproducible.

Keep it to roughly one page. Clear and correct beats long.

Choose how you show it. Present your brief as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about three minutes with a transcript, or as a labelled sketch of the forgetting curve with a short note. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the computations, the interpretations, and the writing yourself, without a chatbot or other AI tool. You may use a calculator or a spreadsheet for the arithmetic. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's numbers, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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