Effects of Experience and Meaningfulness on Learning and Memory in a Sensory Restricted Environment

Abstract

This study examines two previously untested conditions in a sensory restricted environment: meaningfulness and experience. Meaningfulness was measured by employing three different levels of learning material. The learning material consisted of consonant trigrams, words, and paragraphs. Experience (or practice effect) was measured by having subjects perform the experiment on three different sessions with one day break between the sessions. Subjects in the restricted environment recalled significantly better on the most meaningful material--the paragraphs, while the control subjects recalled significantly better on the word list (less meaningful than the paragraphs, but more meaningful than the consonant trigrams). Therefore, the results obtained implicate that the sensory restricted environment used in this study can enhance the learning of higher cognitive tasks.