Teacher Annotated Essay. I will look at how organization of thought can improve memory by discussing mental images, concepts and schemas,.

Alison Sheridan A3923376 Y163

TMA01 Task 1 part B

In this essay I will look at how organization of thought can improve memory by discussing Mental images, Concepts and Schemas, I will look at what they are and how they have been proven to help improve our memory with evidence from various experiments.

Firstly I will look at Mental Images; mental images are pictures in our mind (Icomic thoughts) that will give us a cue to help us remember information, because we are spending a moment concentrating on a picture it is more likely to become fixed in our mind. A mental image can be provided by the key-word method. This is particularly useful in learning foreign words, for example, if you want to remember that the German word Gabel means fork. First, you would think of a key word in English that sounds like the foreign word. For example, gobble; next, you connect the two words through a mental image, such as that of a person gobbling food with a fork. From then on, to recall the meaning of Gabel, you would remember gobble and the stored image linking it to fork.

Michael Rough and Richard Atkinson (1975: Spoors et al 2007 p37) developed this keyword technique. They completed an experiment with 2 groups of participants to help them to learn Spanish words, only half were taught to use the keyword technique where they were asked to think of a keyword and metal image to remind them of the word, at the end of the experiment there was a difference of

A3923376

60% between the 2 groups so this proved that mental images can improve our memory of thought.

We can use this technique in everyday life for example with a shopping list instead of trying to remember just the words we could picture the items in our

Mind in a story sequence or rhyme. A good example is the verse that begins, “Thirty days hath September”, which helps many people remember the number of days in each month

Secondly I will look at Concepts, this is the Process of developing categories for example by putting things from a list into ...

This is a preview of the whole essay

A3923376

60% between the 2 groups so this proved that mental images can improve our memory of thought.

We can use this technique in everyday life for example with a shopping list instead of trying to remember just the words we could picture the items in our

Mind in a story sequence or rhyme. A good example is the verse that begins, “Thirty days hath September”, which helps many people remember the number of days in each month

Secondly I will look at Concepts, this is the Process of developing categories for example by putting things from a list into categories, it has been proven that it is easier to remember items by organizing and grouping similar concepts, or related ideas, together. Arranging the material into groups helps you remember by organizing the information. For example, instead of trying to remember a long list of sports that a sports centre offers you could group all of the sports into one of the following categories: a) Winter sports, b) Track and Field sports, c) Sports using a ball. Or depending on you own way of thinking you could split them into team sports, pairs or single player sports, that way you choose the categories that suit you. The process of organizing a list into groups can often help you to understand the relationship between the concepts better.

George Mander (1976 Spoors et al 2007 p43) completed an experiment where 2 groups of participants were given 100 word cards each, both were asked to sort the cards into groups. Only one group was actually asked to memorise the words whilst sorting.

A3923376

When both groups were tested they both had remembered roughly the same amount of words even though group one were not specifically trying to remember them. This proves that simply by sorting the words into categories they found they were remembering the words.

Finally I will look at Schemas “a mental framework in which you would file all your knowledge about certain objects, situation and groups of people (Spoors et al 2007 p43) a Schema covers all generalized knowledge about situations and events

and consists of a number of parts and relations, by which can structure into many perceptions, images, and events.

For example a schema about going out to eat includes that you often wait to be seated; you get shown a menu, and order choices from that; you have a waiter or waitress that takes your order; that things get served in a particular order; that you get a bill at the end; etc. etc.

Jean Piaget (Spoors et al 2007 p44) spent over 50 years investigating child development especially their thoughts, he came to the conclusion they developed their thought by using schemas he suggests that we file our information from our knowledge of everyday life into sections therefore everything we need to know about an activity, an event, a time, situation etc, we can apply schemas to help us in everyday situations and living.

John Brandsford and Marcia Johnson (1972 Spoors et al 2007 p44) did an experiment that gave 2 groups of participants a piece of writing about doing the

A3923376

daily washing, half the sheets had the title “Daily washing” and the other half had no title at all - this half

although they had the same information, could not understand the passage at all, it made no sense because they didn’t have the schema (subject title). This proved

that without the schemas we would not know what situation to fit the information to.

In this essay I have shown that mental images improve memory by providing extra cues about a word and are more likely to fix into our minds because we have to concentrate on the word to think of a picture to go with it. Concepts help by categorising lists therefore breaking into smaller groups that are all linked in some way therefore making it easier to remember and finally schemas by bringing up a whole file of information that is created by what we have learnt in the past.

All three ways have been proven to help improve our memory, we may use all three or maybe only one or two ways will work with certain people. I think however that most people use a mix of all three without realising it.

Word count 1007

References

Spoors, P., Finlay, L and Dyer, E.W. (2007) Starting with Psychology, Milton Keynes. The Open University. (P 36-37; p40-43)