Psychology

            One thing that everyone has complained about at some point in their life is their memory. People are always worried about forgetting things and when they do forget things it is incredibly annoying. A lot of people claim that they just "have a bad memory." In an effort to figure out exactly why it is that people forget things, scientists have performed countless studies. Many theories have been developed from these studies. One of these theories suggests that similar things are harder to remember. That is, it is harder to remember things that are closely related to each other than it is to remember things that are very different from each other. Another theory is that things are forgotten more easily if they have to be retained for a longer period of time. Both of these theories are generally accepted, and some have done studies to see if the longer remembering period may in fact cause things to become more similar, thus making them harder to remember.
             Harry P. Bahrick, Sandra Clark, and Phyllis Bahrick performed a study in 1967 entitled "Generalization Gradients as Indicants of Learning and Retention of a Recognition Task." The group from Ohio Wesleyan University was attempting to try to find a pattern to the remembrance of visual discrimination. They were trying to improve upon previous studies by relating the results to various time intervals of retention. The first part of the study was performed using drawings of cups. The groupings of the drawings were made up using a very complicated method so that in each set there were cups very similar to each other as well as very different from each other. To each set was added a prototypical drawing of a cup and drawings were randomly positioned in a row of eleven drawings. Then these randomized rows were put together to form a sixteen row by eleven column sheet. One-hundred and sixty male and female volunteers were placed in four different rooms randomly.