Tma01

TMA starting with psychology This essay explains the many ways in which we organise our thoughts and how some may improve our memory. I am looking at mental images, schemas and concepts to demonstrate how we organise our thinking. Mental images are iconic pictures in our mind which describes a word that we are thinking about for example in the textbook 'starting with psychology' it explains how mental images can be used to learn a foreign language, Raugh and Atkinson (1975) used a technique to remember words the example used was to imagine a bin as a bell and then lifting the lid and smelling something terrible, we would have the words “pooh – belle” remembering images relating to words this then gave us the translation for bin. Mnemonics is a technique used to improve the memory, as well as using mental images we may use words, my own example, when I was a child, to remember the order of the solar system I used the words “my very easy method just speeds up naming planets” this gave me the first letter of each planet and by remembering those words enabled me to name the planets in order. Concepts is a way of organising information into categories this is used when doing shopping lists or things to do list because they are in groups like toiletries and fruit and vegetables. It helps to improve the memory because if we forget something it will come back to us whist thinking of another item because one thing often links to another. Weston Bousfield (1953) asked participants for his experiment to learn sixty words and divided them into four categories, the example used was furniture, clothing, flowers and fruit. The items were random but it showed that by remembering hat and sock then it was easier to remember trousers, I tried the experiment in the textbook “Starting with psychology” myself and found that I was then able to remember all the items for the activity. Schemas is described as a framework of knowledge again in the textbook “Starting with psychology” it shows how the memory is a filing cabinet and that each file is a schema, it is the process of doing something, Schemas helps us store information in small bits this enables us to create the bigger picture of what something is. Schema was used by the psychologist Jean Piaget, he investigated the way that children developed their thinking, they did this by developing schemas which are built up from life experiences. So, I have looked at the ways that we can organise our thinking and how they may improve our memory. Mental images gives us pictures of things, concepts put things into categories and schemas which is having knowledge of small bits of information that is developed from experiences. References Bousfield, Weston (1953) – starting with psychology Mandler, George (1967) – starting with psychology Raugh M.R and Atkinson R.C (1975) – starting with psychology