Memory Performance Review Essay

The article that was chosen for this assignment to be updated by a more recent article was the research study conducted on how colour based synesthesia affects memory performance on a given task (Smilek, Dixon, Cudahy, & Merikle, 2002). A 21 year old female, C, was the synesthete in this study who claimed to remember all of the digits in four lists that were presented to a university class, as a memory span exercise, with perfect accuracy while the other students could only remember six of the nine digits in each list. It was also discovered by the researchers that she was able to recall the lists with the same amount of accuracy two hours after the information was presented to her, and subsequently two months after. When asked about how C was able to recall the information across a long period of time, she stated that each number had a specific colour associated with it that she could visualize in her mind’s eye and the association did not ever change. Her …show more content…
Nine synesthetes and 23 control non synesthete participants took part in this experiment where the verbal test triggered synesthesia and the visuo-spatial one did not. The verbal tests were WRMT, WMS-III,, CVLT-II, and the visuo-spatial tests included WRMT, WMS-R, WMS-III, and ROCF. The results concluded that for the verbal tests, synesthetes performed better on the word test instead of the faces test of the WRMT. For the WMS-III3, synesthetes also performed significantly better than the control participants. All other verbal tests did not show a significant memory performance between the synesthetes and non synesthetes. The visuo-spatial tests showed no significant memory performance changes either aside from the ROFC test where synesthetes were able to recall more information on the long-delay recall performance as opposed to non