Tma 01
- Submitted by: dawro
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- Date Submitted: 10/18/2010 08:17 AM
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TMA 01 Task 1
The following essay will explain how we can help improve our memory by organising our thinking, using mental images, concepts and schemas, providing evidence to support my views.
A mental image is a picture you have in your mind of what it is you are thinking about. If you form a mental image of any information then we are more likely to remember it. This works even better when we think of the images as large, colourful, weird and wonderful things, for example if we were shopping and had to remember bananas, we could remember it by imagining your phone was a massive banana. Michael Raugh and Richard Atkinson (1975) experimented with this idea with two groups with something called the key word technique. Both groups were asked to learn a list of 60 Spanish words but only one group were taught to use the key word technique. When the groups were tested later the groups using key words scored an average of 88%, whereas only 28% was scored for those not using key words. This is just one experiment which suggests that mental images can improve our memory.
A concept is a way of organising our thoughts into categories. If we categorise our thoughts, we can easily recall the information in groups. For example if we think of Fruit as a concept, it would contain sub concepts and then further sub concepts. We could divide fruit into categories such Apples, Oranges etc then we apply our concepts to use a set of defining features, such as colour, what they taste like, what they feel like etc
An experiment by Weston Bousfield (1953) examined participants learning a list of sixty words. These could be divided into four categories. The information was presented in a very random order but when the participants remembered them they tended to recall them in groups of the same category e.g. if they remembered daisy they would also remember rose and daffodil. More research by George Mandler (1967) suggests that when we organise information we learn it even...
The following essay will explain how we can help improve our memory by organising our thinking, using mental images, concepts and schemas, providing evidence to support my views.
A mental image is a picture you have in your mind of what it is you are thinking about. If you form a mental image of any information then we are more likely to remember it. This works even better when we think of the images as large, colourful, weird and wonderful things, for example if we were shopping and had to remember bananas, we could remember it by imagining your phone was a massive banana. Michael Raugh and Richard Atkinson (1975) experimented with this idea with two groups with something called the key word technique. Both groups were asked to learn a list of 60 Spanish words but only one group were taught to use the key word technique. When the groups were tested later the groups using key words scored an average of 88%, whereas only 28% was scored for those not using key words. This is just one experiment which suggests that mental images can improve our memory.
A concept is a way of organising our thoughts into categories. If we categorise our thoughts, we can easily recall the information in groups. For example if we think of Fruit as a concept, it would contain sub concepts and then further sub concepts. We could divide fruit into categories such Apples, Oranges etc then we apply our concepts to use a set of defining features, such as colour, what they taste like, what they feel like etc
An experiment by Weston Bousfield (1953) examined participants learning a list of sixty words. These could be divided into four categories. The information was presented in a very random order but when the participants remembered them they tended to recall them in groups of the same category e.g. if they remembered daisy they would also remember rose and daffodil. More research by George Mandler (1967) suggests that when we organise information we learn it even...