Influence of colour on memory

Abstract

Different design principles have been discovered by cognitive psychologist for the purpose of enhancing memory performance. It has been seen that retrieving process is impacted by several variables and one of them is colour. This research provides an overview of colour and memory retention. It comprises of the impact of family type on memory, association between age of participants and recall, most and least frequently words recalled, influence of colour on recall and association between sex of the participants and recall. The study reported the effect of colour on retention rate of school students in the age range of 11-18. Sixty students participated in the experiment conducted. The aim of the study was to determine the effect of the colour of a word on its recall. The independent variable was the colour of the words in the word list. The dependent variable was the number of words recalled by the participants. The research design was independent measures. A Mann-Whitney U test was conducted to analyze the data and the results indicated that there was no statistically significant difference in the number of words recalled based on colour. The group presented with list with all words in black ink on white background performed better than those who were presented with ten words in red ink and ten words in black ink on white background. Results of another Mann- Whitney U test show that females have a statistically significant higher recall than male participants.