Tma01

How can the way in which we organise our thinking by using mental images, concepts and schemas help us improve our memory' Introduction: To answer the question I will start by breaking it down into what I feel are its main parts, • What is memory' • What mental images are and how they help us improve our memory. • What concepts are and how they help us improve our memory. • What schemas are and how they help us improve our memory. What is memory' In order to have memory’s our brains must have plasticity. Plasticity is, as Spoors et al. (2007, P. 8) put it “the ability for the brain to change with learning and experience.” If our brains could not change we would not be able to retain any information. For an analogy we could look at a computer’s hard drive. When we write or do some other type of information processing, for us to keep the information we must be able to save it. Saving the document to the hard disk physically changes the magnetic surface to read as thousands of 1’s and 0’s. If the surface of the disk could not change, all of the information would be lost when the computer was turned off. And, like a computer, to save information, or make memories and retain them, our brains must be able to change. So to define, memory is the processes that are used to store, retain and later retrieve information. What mental images are and how they help us improve our memory. The way think can be described in several different ways • Semantic Thought- Internal Dialogue. • Iconic Thought - Internal Imagery. • Enactive Thought - Internal representation of movement. So a mental image is an internally constructed picture. If you were asked to imagine, for example, what a pineapple looks like, what you would see in your mind is your mental image of a pineapple. Spoors et al. (2007) suggests that most of our thinking is done semantically, thinking in words. But many experiments have been carried out that suggest that we remember information better if we link them with a mental image. There are many techniques that involve mental imagery that can be employed to help improve memory such as mnemonics, the method of loci and the key word technique as developed by Michael Raugh and Richard Atkinson (1975). The use of key words involves using mental images to help learn a new language. For the Spanish word mesa, meaning table, you would think of a similar sounding word in English, I use mess. This would be your key word. You would then create a mental image with the key word and English translation together. I have a table jumping around my living room creating a terrible mess. Derren Brown (2006) suggests that mental images should be vivid, interact and unusual to be more memorable. In an experiment carried out on two groups of participants by Raugh and Atkinson, one group were taught the key word technique and told to use it on learning sixty Spanish words, the other group were to just try and learn the list of Spanish words. When later tested, the participants using the key word technique recalled a staggering 88% of Spanish words compared to only 28% of words remembered by the non-key word group. Mnemonics are a simple memory device using mental images and sometimes simple rhymes to help remember bits of information. Many children are taught mnemonics at school as an aid to remembering things such as the kings of England and colours of the rainbow and the notes on the lines of a treble clef in music notation, Every Good Boy Deserves Football, giving us E, G, B, D, F. The Method of Loci is a memory technique thought to have been invented by the poet Simonides of ceos around 500 B.C. This is a very useful mnemonic for remembering lists of items. It works by the person using the Loci system linking mental images together with a sequence of locations well known to them, such as the school they attended, their home or workplace. These mental images linked with real places form cues in your memory by forming a story line which you can follow. What concepts are and how they help us improve our memory. A concept is the mental grouping of similar things, events and people. We use them to help us understand and remember what things are, and what groups and categories they belong to. Spoors et al. (2007, p40) relates that “When we think about the world one of the ways we organise our thoughts is by putting them into categories”. When we group similar things, events and people, this is called concept formation, they are formed unconsciously and consciously as with study aids like mind maps. In a simplified version of an experiment carried out by Weston Bousfield (1953), participants were asked to learn a list of sixty words, divided in to four categories, presented in a random order. Though there was no order to the words, there was a tendency for the participants to remember them in groups. If they remembered one word from a group, this would cause them to recall other words from the same group. It seem as though categorised information is recalled better due to the way in which it is organised, helping to cue one bit of information with the next. So organising our thoughts into categories helps us retain and recall information easier. What schemas are and how they help us improve our memory. A schema is a mental structure that represents some aspect of the world, developed through experience, it is as Spoors et al (2007, p43.) puts it “the whole package of your thinking when you think about something.” This means, for example, the category for buying clothes would be shopping, but your schema for shopping would be the style of clothes you like, the shops you prefer, things you do when you shop such as eat out and how you feel when you shop. Everything thing that you associate with shopping would be your shopping schema. Schemas organise and sort information appropriately, by providing a mental framework in which to do our thinking. This way they help understanding and provide memory prompts. In an experiment carried out by John Bransford and Marcia Johnson (1972) the use of schemas is illustrated nicely. In the experiment, participants were asked to read a passage describing a simple procedure in detail. Here is a sort extract: “First you arrange things into different groups... of course one pile may be sufficient depending on how much there is to do... it’s better to do too few things at once than too many... The participants were then asked to recall it as accurately as they could. However, half the participants read the passage with the title “Washing clothes” and the other half read it with no title at all. Once the title had been applied, it created a schema for the information understood in and stored properly and making it easier to recall. Conclusion