Tma 01 Starting with Psychology
- Submitted by: faye92
- Views: 459
- Category: Other
- Date Submitted: 08/15/2012 07:25 AM
- Pages: 5
- Report this Essay
Task 1
In this essay I am going to write about the many different strategies and examples of how our memory can be enhanced by the techniques of mental images, concepts and schemas. I am going to describe how they each play a part in our everyday lives, and how we can learn and recognise that they can help us order our thoughts. Organisation can vastly improve our memory because it creates simple mental lists for our brain to process one step at a time, without the overload of information that we can often suffer to work around.
Firstly I am going to explain the use of mental images. Mental images are pictures we hold in our minds of certain objects to help us recognise or understand meanings. This is a commonly used technique and can help us learn through association. Key words are very useful and can be used well in learning new languages. A good example of key words has been referred to in the French word ‘poubelle’ which means bin. The key in this is the pronunciation (pooh-bell) and can trigger imagery of an unpleasant smell in a confined area, such as a bell, in this case.
This example was later used for an experiment that took place by Raugh and Atkinson (1975). Participants were asked to learn a list of Spanish words. Half were taught how to use the key word technique by being given a variable for each word, which can help prompt their memory. This became a very successful method and resulted in this group remembering more words than those that hadn’t learn this technique.
This is where concepts become a similar method of organising your thinking, but could be perhaps easier to appreciate for people who tend to use the left hemisphere of their brain more. A concept is the process of your brain recognising and organising things that belong to similar categories, such as; animals. Animals being a species, but there lots of different breeds, mammals, birds etc. This is a more logical and factual process of organising information. This...
In this essay I am going to write about the many different strategies and examples of how our memory can be enhanced by the techniques of mental images, concepts and schemas. I am going to describe how they each play a part in our everyday lives, and how we can learn and recognise that they can help us order our thoughts. Organisation can vastly improve our memory because it creates simple mental lists for our brain to process one step at a time, without the overload of information that we can often suffer to work around.
Firstly I am going to explain the use of mental images. Mental images are pictures we hold in our minds of certain objects to help us recognise or understand meanings. This is a commonly used technique and can help us learn through association. Key words are very useful and can be used well in learning new languages. A good example of key words has been referred to in the French word ‘poubelle’ which means bin. The key in this is the pronunciation (pooh-bell) and can trigger imagery of an unpleasant smell in a confined area, such as a bell, in this case.
This example was later used for an experiment that took place by Raugh and Atkinson (1975). Participants were asked to learn a list of Spanish words. Half were taught how to use the key word technique by being given a variable for each word, which can help prompt their memory. This became a very successful method and resulted in this group remembering more words than those that hadn’t learn this technique.
This is where concepts become a similar method of organising your thinking, but could be perhaps easier to appreciate for people who tend to use the left hemisphere of their brain more. A concept is the process of your brain recognising and organising things that belong to similar categories, such as; animals. Animals being a species, but there lots of different breeds, mammals, birds etc. This is a more logical and factual process of organising information. This...