How Can The Way In Which We Organize Our thinking By Using Mental Images, Concepts And Schema Help Us Improve Our MemoryIn this assignment I will discuss that there are ways in which we can organize the way we think and improve our memory, first I will talk about the use of mental images moving on to discussing different concepts and finally incorporating structured pre conceived ideas (schemas). Mental images or iconic thought , is your minds way of forming and thinking in pictures, you use mental picture in everyday life evens when recalling what someone looks like the use of mental pictures can be very effective when learning a new language . In starting with psychology (2010) Michael Raugh and Richard Atkinson (1975) developed an idea called the key word technique by which you take a word , for example ??? poubelle??? (pronounced pooh-bell) this is the French word for bin in English and form a large bizarre mental picture, broken down into English the French word ??? poubelle??? would be the equivalent of pooh and bell, this is classed as your key word because it is the English word or words, that sounds like the French word you are learning . You then form a mental picture from the English translation you have made, picture a bin in the shape of a bell and when lifting the lid holding your nose because of the pooh smell. Raugh and Atkinson (1975) tried and tested this out on a group of participants which were asked to learn a list of 60 Spanish words, half the participants were taught the key word technique and the other half the controlled group were not.
Later when asked to recall those words the key word group managed to recall 88% of words compared to only 28% of the controlled group that did not learn the key word technique. This results in showing that the use of mental images can help aid us to improve our memory. Moving on, Concepts are our minds way of organizing our thoughts which help us put them into categories, this can be helpful when looking at memory, take the wordCatLemonChristmasDaisyStrawberryDogButtercupBirthday Take a few seconds try to remember the words on the list cover them over and write down as many as you can recall. Once you have done this look again at the words and categorize the words into ??? cue??? groups of animals, food, flowers, and events.
Then repeat the test and see if you can recall the list better the words have been grouped together and You now have a ??? cue??? word to help. Weston Bousfield (1953) tried a more complex version of this, by asking participants to learn a list of 60 words that were split into four categories, the words were not in any order but participants seemed to remember the words in groups so the word apple would be followed with peach lemon and strawberry because . the ??? cue??? word would be ??? fruit??? This shows that we can remember the information given but when a ??? cue??? word is introduced we tend to store the information better because of the way in which our memory has organized it , it seems the cue word has a knock on affect and causes our memory to recall more of the words. Finally in starting with psychology (2010) page 43 it states a schema ??? is a mental framework of knowledge developed as a result of experience???, basically your memory is like a huge archive where it holds all kind of information about everyday life for example when you think a doctor you associate the words hospital, medicine, surgery, even fear this gives you your doctors schema because your memory is recalling information from your past experience on what you associate with the word doctor. Look at the passage below ??? It is important we do this every day??¦ Sometimes people only do it once on other occasions it may be done twice or even more??¦ A mirror can aid us to see what we are doing??¦. and once finished you put it away until the process needs to be repeated. If it is not done correctly it can cause problems and be an expensive mistake??? . You would look at this and most people would not understand what the passage was about but to give a title of ??? cleaning your teeth??? re read the passage again and things should fall into place just based on your previous knowledge schema of cleaning your teeth.
John Bransford and Marcia Johnson (1972) carried out a similar experiment to show you how schemas can help in our understanding and recall of information, participants were given a passage to read and asked to recall it as correctly as possible, half the participants were given a title the other half of participants were not, most people reported they had a great difficulty in recalling the information without a title. By adding a title it ??? cues??? your brain to recall information that you have already stored previously more easily. On times our memory can be distorted by previous knowledge of what we already know this is called reconstructive memory, you could think of a situation where you have had an argument with someone and when coming to recall the event you would not recall everything exactly so your mind would take adjusting information adding thoughts that never happened or even taking things away that you wish you never said although sometimes this can have devastating effect. In conclusion to this essay by looking at mental pictures concepts and schemas we can see that the way in which we think and act in everyday life plays a big part in our memories, even by using a title or one word can help aid us in memory recall, and with the use of forming and thinking in picture it can help us improve our memory for simple things such as a shopping lists to more complicated things like revising for that important exam.
