Tma01

TMA starting with psychology

This essay explains the many ways in which we organise our

thoughts and how some may improve our memory. I am looking at

mental images, schemas and concepts to demonstrate how we

organise our thinking.

Mental images are iconic pictures in our mind which describes a

word that we are thinking about for example in the textbook

'starting with psychology' it explains how mental images can be

used to learn a foreign language, Raugh and Atkinson (1975) used a

technique to remember words the example used was to imagine a

bin as a bell and then lifting the lid and smelling something

terrible, we would have the words “pooh – belle” remembering

images relating to words this then gave us the translation for bin.

Mnemonics is a technique used to improve the memory, as well as

using mental images we may use words, my own example, when I

was a child, to remember the order of the solar system I used the

words “my very easy method just speeds up naming planets”   this

gave me the first letter of each planet and by remembering those

words enabled me to name the planets in order.

Concepts is a way of organising information into categories this is

used when doing shopping lists or things to do list because

they are in groups like toiletries and fruit and vegetables.

It helps to improve the memory because if we forget something it

will come back to us whist thinking of another item because one

thing often links to another.

Weston Bousfield (1953) asked participants for his experiment to

learn sixty words and divided them into four categories, the

example used was furniture, clothing, flowers and fruit. The items

were random but it showed that by remembering hat and sock then

it was easier to remember trousers, I tried the experiment in the

textbook “Starting with psychology” myself and found that I was

then able to remember all the items for the activity.

Schemas...