human memory

human memory....What does it mean?

Which list was the easiest for you? Most people do their best on Experiment 1. Below is a chart that details the results gathered from a group of 39 people who had participated in the same experiments as you. 

No. Correct	Exp. 1	Exp. 2	Exp. 3
19-20	4	0	0
17-18	11	0	0
15-16	12	1	0
13-14	9	0	1
11-12	2	1	4
9-10	1	4	4
7-8	0	10	10
5-6	0	13	9
3-4	0	8	11
1-2	0	0	0

As you can see from the graph, in the first experiment (in blue), people scored much higher than in experiments 2 or 3. Why were experiments 2 and 3 so much more difficult than 1? Well, there are a couple of types of differences. Ask yourself: what kinds of words were in each group? In some of the experiments the words belonged to a group, and in some they didn't. Another question: Did I have anything else to do besides remember the words? Sometimes having something else to do makes it harder to remember the first thing. One more question for yourself: How familiar was I with the words? Do I use them everyday, once a week, never? This might affect how easy it is for you to remember something.After thinking about these things, you might know why the first experiment seemed so easy compared to the others. You really had only five categories of things to remember: money, fruits, directions, names, and colors. The number of words is much easier to handle when they can be grouped. Sometimes, this grouping will cause you to remember words that weren't there but were in the group. Also, the list was made entirely of everyday, common nouns. North and apple are words that we've used a lot in our life, so the path to remembering them is strong and easy to use. You had nothing to complicate your task after the words were read, you simply wrote them down.
Compare this to the second experiment. There wasn't something after the list to make it complicated, but the words were nothing like those in the first experiment. They were all words that weren't very common in daily life. There were twenty separate words, that couldn't easily be grouped. Since the short-term memory can really only handle about seven things at a time, five categories weren't hard, but twenty words were. These differences made experiment 2 harder.
Then you can see how experiment 3 was different, too. The words could be related somewhat (like dice, hand, royal can be all; related to cards) by you, but this required thinking that might distract you from your task. These words mirror experiment 2's in that the words are mostly uncommon and hard to remember. However, the biggest difference is that after this experiment you were asked to repeat back numbers by threes, which requires thought. This thought probably distracted you (like nearly everyone else) and thus your score was lower here.
All of these factors that affect a human's ability to remember are things you can manipulate in your own life. If its important for you to remember a lot of stuff, try to group it, try to think about them a lot, and try to not do something complicated afterward. Help your memory work for you!