Searching Under Cups for Clues about Memory: An Online Demonstration

This web page provides instructions and information regarding a demonstration which helps students better understand the way people search short-term memory. This demonstration involves rapidly searching under cups for a ball and has been shown to successfully increase understanding of Sternberg's (1966) short-term memory scanning task (see Kahan & Mathis, 2007).

The demonstration can either be conducted manually (using small cups and aluminum foil) or using this computer-based demonstration. A 50 minute class period should be devoted to this activity if it is conducted manually whereas the entire activity can be completed in 10-15 minutes using the electronic version.

Demo 1 -

Instructions for the manual version of this demonstration can be found by clicking here.(pdf format).

Demo 2 -

The electronic version of this demonstration was created using Macromedia Authorware V6.0. We created this program so that it will run either locally on any PC computer or online through a web browser. However this demo was created in 2010 and most current web browsers will no longer play the web-based version. In our testing the executable version of the demonstration still works on Windows computers.

Click here to download the executable version that will run on your PC computer (zip format). You will need to extract all of these files using WinZip (or a similar program). When you extract the files you should have "SternbergToP.exe" located in a unique directory and the files "JPEGIMP.X32", "MIX32.X32", "MIXVIEW.X32", & "VIEWSVC.X32" located in the folder "XTRAS". Note: It is important to maintain this file structure -- do NOT move the files out of the XTRAS folder.

Click here to try the online version. This demo was created in 2010 and most current web browsers will not play this version of the demo. If you want to try using this version of the demo then click here to download the free plugin. (Use the "installer full" version.)

If you are an Authorware programmer you may dowload the source code for this demonstration by clicking here Please feel free to edit the source code to suit your needs.

Note: This site has links to the demonstration only, not the experiment reported in Kahan & Mathis (2007), which contained control conditions and quiz questions.