Effects of Imagery, Cognitive Style and Gender on Prospective and Retrospective Memory

Effects of Imagery, Cognitive Style and Gender on Prospective and Retrospective Memory.

ABSTRACT  

This experiment investigated the effects of imagery, cognitive style, and gender on prospective and retrospective memory. One hundred and sixty (160) participants, comprising 80 males (mean age = 22.54 years) and 80 females (mean age = 21.30 years) were randomly selected using the table of random numbers on a population of 200 third- and second-year undergraduate students of the Department of Psychology, University of Nigeria, Nsukka.

The stimulus materials used were Group Embedded Figures Test (Oltman, Raskin, Herman & Witkin 1971); and Paired Associate words (Mefoh, 2009). Prospective and retrospective memory were tested using prospective memory test developed by the researcher and paired associate recall test developed by Mefoh (2009). Imagery was manipulated by verbal instruction. The experiment used a 2x2x2 factorial design.

Multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) was the main statistic used for data analysis. Result of the data analysis indicated that on prospective and retrospective memory, participants in the imagery condition differed significantly from others in the non-imagery condition (p<.000). Cognitive style had no significant effect on both prospective and retrospective memory. 

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INTRODUCTION  

Human memory performs many important functions. Some of which include storage of intentions about future plans, goals, activities, and countless thoughts, fantasies, and recollections about the events of earlier in the day, last week, or years ago. And one may keep wondering how people manage to remember numerous activities in the past or planned intentions. This probably resulted to why memory featured prominently in the early years of psychology as a science (Gross, 2010).

Today, Psychologists are increasingly interested in everyday memory, rather than studying it merely as a laboratory phenomenon (Gross, 2010). Blakemore (1988) expresses the fundamental importance of memory when he stated that without the capacity to remember and to learn or future intentions, it is difficult to imagine what life would be like, whether it could be called living at all. Without memory, people would be servants of the moment, with nothing but their innate reflexes to help them deal with the world.

There could be no language, no art, no science, and no culture. Civilisation itself is the distillation of human memory. The consistency and accuracy of memories is therefore an achievement, not a mechanical production. Memory, like learning, is a hypothetical construct denoting three distinguishable but interrelated processes; Registration (or encoding), Storage, and Retrieval (Gross, 2010). The later been the process by which stored information is extracted from memory is the main focus in this research work.

Retrieval memory in this research is viewed in two forms, prospective and retrospective memory. Human minds have two very different type of memory constantly working, prospective and retrospective memory. Prospective memory refers to remembering to perform an intended action in the future or simply remembering to remember or as defined by Kvavilashvili, Ellis, Brandimonte, Einstein, and McDaniel (1996) is remembering to do something at a particular moment in the future or the timely execution of a previously formed intention. 

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