Tma01

How can the way in which we organise our thinking by using mental images, concepts and schemas help us improve our memory' There are many ways in which we can organise our thoughts to improve our memory and in this assignment I’m going to explore several of these. The first method we’re going to use is that of mental images. This way of organising our thoughts has proved very effective over the years for learning many things, including languages. A very simple example of this a key word technique for remembering the French word for bin which is ‘Poubelle’. In order to remember this we need to think of English words that sound a little like the parts of the French word. In this case, imagine a bin which is bell shaped and doesn’t smell very good, in fact smells of pooh! Michael Raugh and Richard Atkinson developed an experiment building on this technique whereby the gathered a group of participants (who presumably had no previous knowledge of Spanish) and ask them to remember 60 Spanish words. They taught half of the group the key word technique and the other half used whatever technique they wanted. The half who had been taught the key word technique scored significantly better, 88% of words were remembered compared to only 28% for the other half. Another way of improving memory is by the use of Mnemonics, a simple way for improving memory by using a very short poem or a special word. One such example I have used for around 15 years is to remember the ISO model which is used in networking. I use the phrase Please Do Not Throw Sausage Pizza Away to represent a list of Physical, Data, Network, Transport, Session, Presentation, Application. Mnemonics were used as far back as 500BC. The poet Simonides developed what is known as the method of loci. This simple technique works by linking mental images of items with a sequence of locations (loci is the latin for places). If, for example you were trying to remember a shopping list of milk, bread, eggs, carrots, potatoes you might imagine a flood of milk coming through your front door which is made of bread, breaking the furniture in the hallway which is made of eggs, forcing you through the kitchen door made of carrots into your kitchen where everything is made of potatoes. The second method we’re going to use to help us improve our memory is that of forming concepts. This basically means putting our thoughts into categories and then into sub-categories. An example of this would be the concept of animals that then contains sub-concepts and further sub-concepts, so we would have the main concept of animals, a sub-concept which could be mammals, a further sub-concept which could be rabbits and then we could divide this further into giant rabbit, dwarf rabbit, lop-eared rabbit etc. With all of these concepts we tend to think of a set of distinct features to help us. For example, a dwarf rabbit is categorised into the concept of rabbits because it has a number of features that we have learnt to associate with rabbits; long ears, twitchy noses and fluffy tails. It is worth noting however that we don’t necessarily apply these features too firmly, there are other animals that have long ears, twitchy noses and fluffy tails that aren’t rabbits. One thing that we do need to be careful with when using concepts is that we don’t over generalise. For example, if we were asked to create a concept for an motor car we might say that it’s a metal object with 4 wheels and an engine. There are other items types of automobiles that also conform to this concept, for example a van or lorry, even at a stretch, an aeroplane, as well as motor cars that don’t conform to this concept, such as a Reliant Robin. There is a well know phrase which is ‘fuzzy logic’ which explains how sometimes it’s difficult to apply such firm definitions. Lastly we’re going to discuss how we can use what are known as schemas to help us improve our memory. Schema comes from the Greek work skhēma, which means shape, or more generally, plan. The official plural for schema is schemata but in English the word schemas can also be used. A schema is in essence a mental framework into which all of the knowledge you’ve gathered about people, objects, behaviours and even yourself is gathered. One Swiss psychologist, Jean Paiget, spent over 50 years investigating the way children developed their thinking and he came up the theory that a schema is like a giant filing cabinet. Imagine a schema called ‘taking a long haul flight’. This schema would contain all the knowledge that you’ve amassed about taking a long haul flight, such as booking the ticket, turning up 2 hours before the flight, checking in, passport control, duty free shopping, boarding the plane, watching a movie, eating etc. Each time you take a long haul flight you don’t have to start at the beginning again because you already have the information, you just need to access the correct schema. This helps us deal with many (if not most) of the day to day situations that occur with us simply using knowledge of a similar past situation. It’s advantageous for us to share these schemas with others as they will generally be very similar but where our experiences are different so too are our schemas. If you love cars for example your schema will be filled with the smell of a new car, the sound of a high powered engine, optional extras etc. If you see cars simply as a way of getting from A to B your schema will be filled with just the functional information. How many seats does it have, is it reliable, how often you have to fill up with petrol. To conclude we have looked at 3 ways of improving our memory firstly using mental images which included key word techniques, mnemonics and the method of loci. We then moved onto forming concepts in which we discussed the concepts of rabbits and the dangers of overgeneralisation and finally we looked at schemas and how these can be similar as well as different between different people.