1. The Effects of Acting Experience at the College Level on Memory Span
Sarah Blanton, Lauren Drew, William Neltner
Hanover College

2. Short Term Memory Sometimes referred to as Primary or Working Memory
Said to hold information for up to 15 seconds
7±2 (Miller, 1956)
STM can be expanded through various techniques
chunking
chunking refers to a strategy for making more efficient use of short-term memory by recoding information

3. The Effect of Experience
Theatre Majors (particularly actors) are asked to memorize text on a more regular basis, thus more experience remembering groups of words presented to them.

4. Research Question
How does a person’s background (as indicated by their major) affect their ability to do different memory tasks?

5. Hypothesis
We predict that theatre majors (particularly actors) will perform better than the average student on memory tasks involving words.

6. Method Informed Consent Given instructions
Actors only, non-actor data was collected through Cognition Class requirement
Given instructions
Completed Memory Span experiment
Data recorded by researcher

7. Participants N=22 70% Female 100% Caucasian 12 Non-actors, 10 actors
All non-actors were in an upper level psychology course
All actors were theatre majors

8. Results

9. Numbers
t(20) = 2.624, p = .016

10. t(20) = 1.865, p = .077

11. Discussion Experience has an affect on a person’s ability for recall
Better use of recall techniques
Why did theatre majors do better with long words and nothing else?
Actors work with long lists of words and memorizing diverse vocabulary in a particular order
Actors typically do not deal with numbers
Everyone deals with short words and other stimuli on a daily basis

12. Discussion Limited participant pool may have affected results
All participants were from Hanover College
All non-actors were in a 300 level psychology course

13. Future Research The effect of other demographics
Level of education
Years of experience in theatre
Different types of acting
Examine other areas including artists and singers
Look at larger more representative sample

14. Questions?