Memory_Essay

Memory improvement.Our memories are a very special and unique way in which our brain stores information. To be able to store information we firstly need to know ways in which we organise our thoughts in different ways, and consider how organisation of thought can lead to improved memory. Organising our thoughts involves the use of mental images, concepts and schemas. In this essay I will be identifying ways of using mental images, concepts and schemas to improve our memory. A mental image also known as (iconic thought) in psychology terms is a picture we produce in our brain that translates what we are thinking from a word to an image. When we are learning or thinking we do so in word form, however numerous experiments have been carried out to support the fact that when we are to remember verbal or written information we can recall it better if we use mental images of the information we receive, as the mental image will give us another cue when we come to recall the information. Micheal Raugh and Richard Atkinson(1975) carried out experiments to support this by developing a key word technique. They asked two groups of participants to learn a list of sixty Spanish words by using a key word technique, this technique is used by taking a word like 'poubelle' which is pronounced as (pooh- bell) and is translated as 'bin' in English. Half of the participants using the key words were asked to think of an English word that sounds like the French word or part of the word. Then you make a mental picture of the key word in English. So with the word 'poubelle' you could picture yourself lifting a lid off a 'bin' that was shaped like a 'bell' and it smells like 'poo'. By using this technique the participants scored eighty eight percent, compared to the other half of participants who did not use the key word technique. Another way of organising our thoughts is by using concepts, concepts are a way we receive information and put the information we receive in to categories of the same group. Even without knowing it we seem to use this form of organising our thoughts regularly. There are many types of categories that we place things we see in to, if a group of objects share the same properties we tend to organise them in to groups or categories to make it easier when we come to recall the information. Its easier to look at how much we use concepts by looking at memory experiments, Weston bousfield(1953) carried out numerous experiments in the aim of showing how concepts improve memory. He asked a group of participants to learn sixty words in random order, that could also be divided in to four categories, within the list of objects were, furniture, fruit, clothing, and flowers. Participants tended to remember things off the list that belonged to the same category, so if they remembered an apple they also remembered any other fruit off the list. Other research from George Mandler (1967) also suggests that by organising information we tend to learn it even when we are not really trying to. Mandler carried out an experiment by giving two groups of participants a deck of a hundred cards, each card had a certain word printed on it, each participant was told to sort the cards in to groups. The difference between the two groups of participants was one group was asked to try and memorise the words on the cards while sorting them, but the other group was tested later by being asked to write down all the words they could remember after the test. The group who was only told to sort the cards remembered just as many words as the group asked to memorise the words on the cards. This experiment suggests that we categorise items and store them in our memory automatically, it also suggests as in the experiment by Weston Bousfield when we try to recall information that has been organised each piece of information cues the next piece because we have it stored in an organised fashion. The third way in which we organise our thoughts and is also similar to using concepts but is more extensive and that is the use of schemas. The term schema was used by an influential Swiss psychologist named Jean Piagot to illustrate the ways in which we set up a mental framework of knowledge in our brain as a result of experience to use again and again. By using our schemas we can help improve our memory as they help recall information from past experiences, its as if our memory is a huge filing cabinet and each file in the cabinet stores our knowledge about certain objects, situations and even people. So if you opened a file (schema) that was labelled swimming it would contain all our knowledge of going swimming and what it involves, such as paying to get in, changing in to our swimwear, putting on our goggles, and if we are going swimming in a different place that we had never been before you would not start from from the beginning you would just activate your swimming schema which would hold all the information you need for doing that particular activity. Our schemas also only hold a certain amount of information on experiences that we are involved or interested in, so if you loved going to the gym your schema would hold a lot more information than someone who has no interest in going to the gym, as their schema would probably hold only what they expect rather than what they have experienced. John Bransford and Mercia Johnson (1972) carried out a number of experiments which illustrated the role of schemas in our understanding of recall of information. They did this by asking two different groups of participants to read a written passage, one group had a title on their written passage, the other group without a title. They found that the group who had a title, used information from their schemas and understood it more or less straight away, with a title it shows we go to our stored filing cabinet(schema) and use it to recall what's written. Their findings showed that we use our schemas to recall information on past experiences. In this essay I have been exploring ways in which we organise our thinking and how the use of concepts, mental images and schemas can help improve our recall. I've also looked at different ways in which psychologists have carried out experiments to support the information in the essay. Word count. 1100 words. References. Atkinson R,(1975) Bousfield W(1953), Bransford J(1972), Johnson M(1972), Mandler G(1967), piagot J, and Raugh M.(1975) y163 starting with psychology, Milton Keynes, The open university, prepared for the course team by Pat Spoors, Linda finlay and Ernest dyer.