Rehearsal
Rehearsal as memory technique involves verbal repetition of information (often words), which typically has the effect of increasing our long-term memory for the rehearsed information.
Rehearsal is the mental repetition or mental “practicing” of some to-be-learned material. It is usually manifested as implicit speech, or “talking to oneself”—what you do when you need to remember somebody’s phone number but can’t write it down.
For example, if you repeat a phone number you heard at a party, you can remember it until you get home and write it down; you can remember phone numbers you call frequently.
Rehearsal refreshes items in short-term memory; it keeps them active and prevents them from decaying.
Researchers conducted a study to find out how long information is remembered without rehearsal by asking subjects (participants) to remember a series of consonants composed of three meaningless letters such as CHJ.
Subjects were prevented from rehearsing by having to count backward immediately after seeing the groups of three letters. Eighty percent of the subjects recalled the groups of three letters after three seconds. However, only 10 percent of the subjects recalled the groups of three letters after five seconds. This experiment was conducted in the 1950s by Peterson and Peterson.
Although this task—remembering groups of three letters—seemed ridiculously easy, almost all the subjects had forgotten the groups of three letters after 15 seconds when prevented from rehearsing. This study clearly showed that information disappears from short-term memory within seconds unless we continually rehearse the information.
Rehearsal or mental practice can extend the time that information remains in short-term memory Opens in new window but rehearsal prevents new information from entering short-term memory.
