Role Of Subjective And Objective Importance In Memory

The Need for Selectivity in Memory

Discuss about the Role of Subjective and Objective Importance.

In the 21^st century people have access to large amount of information everyday and retaining useful information has become one major problem. When there is lots of information one has to be selective and the priority of the collected information should be set so that the important and useful information can be recalled when required (Friedman, McGillivray, Murayama, & Castel, 2015). Memory plays an important role in storing the information and recalling later. Some of the scholars have compared the human memory with the computer system also which is known as the information processing model. In this process there are three steps through which the information goes namely the encoding, storage and retrieval. Memory is mainly related to the third stage i.e retrieval (Benjamin, 2012; Friedman et al., 2015).

Since memory plays an important role not only for the students but also in every stage of human life the current research has been conducted to find the conditions where the memory is better. In other words the current research is aimed to answer following research question:

1. In what condition people have better memory?
2. Does physical exercise, drinking habit, IQ level have significant impact on memory?

To answer these research questions the repeated measure techniques has been used. The repeated measure techniques were developed to study the difference in the same participant over the period of time. In other words, as the name suggests the repeated measure is used when the data is collected from the same respondents in different time period. It analyze whether there is significant difference in different time period(Field, 2011).

The main advantage of using repeated measure technique is that it allows the researcher to record the change in an individual over the period of time, which is not possible in the cross sectional studies.  In cross sectional records are collected at only point of time. Apart from that the repeated measure method is better statistical tool to detect the change over the period of time with less cost(Guo, Logan, Glueck, & Muller, 2013).

Previous scholars have also used repeated measure tool in their study.  A study by (Cleophas, Zwinderman, & Ouwerkerk, 2009) use the repeated measure technique to  analyze the cardionvascular. Authors used paired t-test , Analysis of variance (ANOVA) for repeated measure to analyze the collected data.  Another study by (Singh, Rana, & Singhal, 2013) used the repeated measure technique for analyzing the clinical trials data. The data was collected in two different time period and repeated time ANOVA analysis was used to get the results as the simple ANOVA is not appropriate for the data with repeated measure.  Similarly  (Kim, 2015)  used the one way ANOVA in repeated measure technique to  find the impact of some particular treatment under clinical trials. So this shows that the repeated measure technique is popular in medical research, however latterly it has been used in social science research also.

The Repeated Measure Technique

The current research is aimed to find the condition where the individual has better memory. For the analysis purpose primary data was collected among 100 individuals in four different time period.  So the total number of observation is 2500. The close ended questionnaire was used to collect the data and respondents were chosen randomly. In case of random sampling each and every element in the data set has equal probably of being selected in the sample and the random sampling is considered to be the better sampling techniques as compared to the non-random sampling for repeated measure analysis. Prior collecting the final data, a pilot study was conducted among 25 respondents and the reliability was tested. The results from the reliability showed satisfactory results, after that the final survey was conducted. Same respondents were taken into survey in four different time period. Since the repeated measure techniques has been identified as the best technique to use for such analysis the data was collected accordingly. In terms of demographic profile, all the respondents were in the age group of 25 to 45. This is because the individual in the younger age and older age may not take the memory test properly. Also the responses have minimum level of education and they are able to read and understand the questions included in the questionnaire (Shukla & Kumar, 2012).

For the current research different factors were taken into consideration. The list of the variables included in the current study is as follows:

• Happy memories – it takes the value 1 if applicable to the individual and 0 if not applicable on the individual
• Listen music – It takes the value 1 if the respondents listen to music and 0 if the respondents do not listen to music
• Outside running – It takes the value 1 if the respondents go for running outside and 0 if the respondents do not go for running.
• Drink red wine – It takes the value 1 if the respondent drinks red wine and 0 if the respondents do not drink red wine
• IQ – It is the IQ score of the respondent.

For the analysis purpose the repeated measure ANOVA analysis was performed. First the primary data was imported in R from the excel sheet using the read.csv command in R. The one row per observation method was followed to import the data into long form. The wide is more appropriate if there is large number of variables and less observations. Prior conducting the ANOVA the conditional means was extracted for every individual and each combination of factors used in the study. After the conditional mean the repeated measure ANOVA was performed to see whether the respondents have better memory after taking consideration different factor such as the running, listening music, drinking red wine and IQ score. If the memory improve over the period of time it can be concluded that the factors have significant on the memory improving. Results from the analysis are discussed in the next section.

The main aim of the current research is to find the impact of the various factors on better memory. With the help of repeated measure technique it was identified where the person have better memory.  Two way ANOVA was used to find whether there is significant impact on the memory, before and after some activity.

Data Collection and Sample Size

Results from the descriptive analysis show that the except for the IQ score all the other variable are categorical variables. In fact all the variables are binary, which takes only the value 0 or 1. In case of IQ test which is the only continuous variable in the data set shows that the average IQ score of the respondents included in the sample is 68.63. The minimum score is 57. 59 whereas the maximum IQ score is 79.67. This indicates that the data is normally distributed as most of the observations are near the mean value.

Results from the repeated measure ANOVA is shown in the tables below. Impact of the each factors and their interaction is shown separately. Since the data was collected for the different time period it is important to include the error term in the analysis which will take into consideration the natural variation from one respondents to another participants.

For the current research the repeated measure ANOVA was used for the analysis and the results shows that running outside, while listening to music show significant impact on the memory. It has been shown in the previous research also that exercise has significant on memory; the results from current study are in line with the previous one. Running helps to concentrate which may be reason that running has significant impact to have better memory. With increase in concentration individuals are able to retain the important information and recall when required.

Apart from the repeated measure ANOVA one can also use the logistic regression to see the impact of different factors on memory. Some of the previous researchers have used logistic regression analysis for same purpose and got similar results. So, one can used either logistic regression or repeated measure ANOVA for the data collected in different time period. One problem with the repeated measure is when the error model comes out to be singular. There are different methods to overcome singular problem which can be further explored. Similarly further research can be conducted taking into consideration some other factors which can lead to better memory. Similarly one can perform both the logistic regression and repeated measure techniques for the same data set and compare the results.

References

Benjamin, A. S. (2012). Factors influencing learning. Illinois.

Cleophas, T. J., Zwinderman, A. H., & Ouwerkerk, B. M. van. (2009). Methods for analysing cardiovascular studies with repeated measures. NCBI, 17(11).

Field, A. (2011). Discovering Statistics Using SPSS (3rd ed.). California: SAGE Publication.

Friedman, M. C., McGillivray, S., Murayama, K., & Castel, A. D. (2015). Memory for Medication Side Effects in Younger and Older Adults: The Role of Subjective and Objective Importance. California.

Guo, Y., Logan, H. L., Glueck, D. H., & Muller, K. E. (2013). Selecting a sample size for studies with repeated measures. NCBI, 13(3).

Kim, H.-Y. (2015). Statistical notes for clinical researchers: A one-way repeated measures ANOVA for data with repeated observations. Restorative Dentistry & Endodontics, 40(1).

Shukla, G., & Kumar, V. (2012). Different Methods Of Analyzing Multiple Samples Repeated Measures Data. Journal of Reliability and Statistical Studies, 5(1), 83–93.

Singh, V., Rana, R. K., & Singhal, R. (2013). Analysis of repeated measurement data in the clinical trials. NCBI, 4(2).