A Level Psychology/ memory and organisation

Authors Avatar

Rachael Dunn 12M

Introduction: Does organisation aid memory?

  One reason that studying memory and organisation may be interesting is because the area was neglected, up until the 1990’s, when psychologists became interested in how an ‘enormously important but complex facility operates in people’ after being stimulated by the attempts to provide information about computer systems and how information is organised.( R.Gross, Hodder and Sloughton)

One theory in relation to memory suggests that organisation may occur at two separate stages of memory. Meyer said ‘to remember is to have organised’ and suggested that organisation either occurs at storage or at retrieval. Meyer suggested that at storage organisation serves to reduce the amount of material to be remembered and does this by grouping it hierarchically or by chunking it (putting it into chunks to remember).At retrieval he argued that organised items have greater uniqueness and therefore more retrieval routes assocciated with them.This suggests that organisation aids memory either by reducing the amount of information or by providing items with more reason to be remembered.( Broadbent, D.E., Cooper, P.J. & Broadbent)

Join now!

  A key study into hierarchy and memory was conducted by Collins and Quillian 1969 which proposed the hierarchical network model. This model was concerned with how words are organised in relation to their semantic meanings.Semantic memory was portrayed as a network of words which are connected to other when there is a semantic similarity. The meaning of a word is said to be given by ‘pointers’ which basically point from the word out to the meaning. For example, Collins and Quillian suggested that pointers could indicate properties. For example a ‘canary’ would have pointers to ‘can sing’. Other pointers ...

This is a preview of the whole essay