Category Membership as a Factor in Verbal Memory

Abstract

This study examined the effect of category membership on verbal memory. Eighty (80) participants composed of 40 males and 40 females were sampled from a mixed secondary school. All the participants were either in senior secondary class I or H. Their ages ranged between 14 and 18 years, with a mean age of 15.72 years. The study adopted a two-randomized-group design. Results of independent groups t-test showed that recall performance was better in the organized category condition than in the randomized category condition: t = -5.67, df = 78, P < .001. The result supports previous studies, which demonstrated that organization was critical for memory performance. The present researchers argue that organizing information into categories was not only important at the time of encoding, but also at retrieval.