A useful extension to Nickerson and Adams's (1979) task of remembering the features of a common U.S. penny is memorizing the features of a Mercury dime. After a minute of study, students recall more features of the dime than of the unstudied penny. This demonstration effectively illustrates the subjective nature of scientific judgments, the value of statistics in data management, arid part of the rationale for including a method and results section in a scientific paper. In addition, it exposes students to the principle of memory and attention that details of an object or event are difficult to remember unless they are intentionally studied.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
BourneL. E., DominowskiR. L., LoftusE. F., & HealyA. F. (1986). Cognitive processes (2nd ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
2.
MarmieW. R., RullyG. R., & HealyA. F. (1993). On the long-term retention of studied and unstudied U.S. coins. In The Proceedings of the Fifteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 687–692). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.
