The NASA Cognition laboratory is a part of the Human-Automation Integration Research Branch at NASA Ames Research Center. The Cognition lab conducts experiments on perceptual and cognitive processes to help create models for the human operators in human-machines systems (NASA Cognition Lab. (n.d.). Retrieved November 8, 2014.). This research is conducted to test individual human and group limitations in relation to aerospace operations. They are currently conducting several different studies at this current time. One of the current studies is on the limitations of human information processing. This research is focused on testing multi-tasking limitations and human attention limitations.
Recognition
I was able to complete the recognition task in only two tries. I was focused on all the writings so I didn’t realize that I chose the one with the head facing the wrong way. Once I got it wrong I instantly realized the head was facing the wrong way and chose the correct answer. This task can be difficult for many people, because the brain needs very little information to distinguish a penny from other change. The color of the penny would probably be enough to distinguish it from other change, so there is no need for your brain to focus on all the little details like the location of the date. This is just one example of your brain trying to be efficient by taking the least amount of space in your memory (Recall Experiment Explanation. (n.d.). Retrieved November 8, 2014.).
Mnemonic
I decided to create a mnemonic device to help me remember the human memory process. I decided to go with “Eat Salad Regularly” to help me remember encoding, storage, and retrieval. I am not really sure that this would be very helpful when studying for the exam. I know for one the process of creating the mnemonic device was very time consuming. I think if I tried to incorporate this into my studies I would waste too much valuable time creating all the mnemonic devices, when I could be using a more efficient method. The book mentions the fact that mnemonic devices can be helpful, but they can be hard to use and hard to apply to many everyday situations (Weiten, 2014).
Recall
On the first recall experiment I got 15 out of 20 answers correct. I found this experiment to be the easiest one because there were many words that were similar and that could be grouped together which made remembering them much easier. These experiments are attempting to tap the short-term memory. The book states that the short-term has a limited capacity that can maintain information for up to 20 seconds (Weten,2014). That is why these sound clips are only 20 seconds long. The second experiment was a bit harder than the first one I only got 6 out of 20 words correct. The website states that this experiment is harder because the words used in this experiment are uncommon and hard to remember because there was no way to group them (Human Memory Experiment Explanation. (n.d.). Retrieved November 8, 2014). Now for the third experiment I got 4 out of 20 words correct. This experiment was even harder than the second one. The words could somewhat be grouped together but this required some thinking which posed to be distracting. I think that counting backwards was probably the most distracting part of this experiment, the low score can attest to that. Overall compared to the information on the website I scored relatively the same as the majority of the group that was sampled.
Interference
On the interference experiments my scores were almost the same on all of the experiments. The first experiment I got 4 out of 7 correct. What was funny was that I actually got all the numbers correct but I put some of them in the wrong order. On the second experiment I got 5 out of 7 correct. Again I had all the numbers correct but I had the two swapped. Lastly on the third experiment I got 4 out of 7 correct. This was the most difficult of them all, I found that I had a few numbers