Bobbie took part in a memory experiment.As she studied a list of to-be-remembered words, she took the time to form an elaborate image of each word.She was confident she would do well on the later memory test, but the researchers did not ask her to recall the actual words.Instead, they asked her to recall whether each word was printed in upper-case or lower-case letters.Bobbie did very poorly on the test, scoring only at chance levels.Based on what is known about memory processes, you should conclude that Bobbie had problems with the memory test because she:
A)was affected by proactive interference
B)did not use transfer-appropriate processing
C)experienced the serial position effect
D)was affected by retroactive interference

Question

Quizplus · Accepted Answer

Bobbie's failure on the memory test suggests that she did not use transfer-appropriate processing. She used elaborate rehearsal to encode the words, but she did not focus on the specific information that was being tested (i.e. upper vs lower case letters). Transfer-appropriate processing suggests that memory is better when the encoding and retrieval processes match. In this case, Bobbie's encoding process did not match the retrieval process, resulting in poor performance on the test.

Bobbie Took Part in a Memory Experiment