Thank you again for participating in this study. Here’s what the study was all about.

When your study for class, sometimes you use a “shallow” approach. That is, you don’t really pay much attention to the deeper meaning of what you're studying - perhaps you just underline sentences and repeatedly "look over" these underlines before the test. If you do this you're just paying attention to surface-level things. In this study, some participants were asked to simply determine if there was an E or a G in their list of words. They were asked to focus on this surface level aspect of each word. This group probably did poorly on the recognition test.

Another way to study is to use a “deep” approach. Using this approach, when you study a topic you’re thinking about what the words mean or you try to picture the word or try to relate the word to yourself. Some participants were given the same list as the “shallow” group, but they were asked whether they considered the words as pleasant. This requires you to think about the meaning of the words and not just whether it contains an E or a G. We expect participants in this group to do quite well on the recognition test because of this deeper level of processing they used when they looked at the words.

Curious about the results? Click the Results button below.