Human Memory

Activity . word will function as the keyword. For example, if you want to remember the Spanish word for duck which is ‘Pato’, you may choose ‘pot’ as the keyword and then evoke images of keyword and the target word (the Spanish word you want to remember) and imagine them as interacting. You might, in this case, imagine a duck in a pot full of water.

This method of learning words of a foreign language is much superior compared to any kind of rote memorisation. (b) The Method of Loci : In order to use the method of loci, items you want to remember are placed as objects arranged in a physical space in the form of visual images. This method is particularly helpful in remembering items in a serial order. It requires that you first visualise objects/places that you know well in a specific sequence, imagine the objects you want to remember and associate them one by one to the physical locations.

For example, suppose you want to remember bread, eggs, tomatoes, and soap on your way to the market, you may visualise a loaf of bread and eggs placed in your kitchen, tomatoes kept on a table and soap in the bathroom. When you enter the market all you need to do is to take a mental walk along the route from your kitchen to the bathroom recalling all the items of your shopping list in a sequence. Mnemonics using Organisation Organisation refers to imposing certain order on the material you want to remember. Mnemonics of this kind are helpful because of the framework you create while organisation makes the retrieval task fairly easy.

(a) Chunking : While describing the features of short-term memory, we noted how chunking can increase the capacity of short-term memory. In chunking, several smaller units are combined to form large chunks. For creating chunks, it is important to discover some organisation principles, which can link smaller units. Therefore, apart from being a control mechanism to increase the capacity of short-term memory, chunking can be used to improve memory as well.

(b) First Letter Technique : In order to employ the first letter technique, you need to pick up the first letter of each word you want to remember and arrange them to form another word or a sentence. For example, colours of a rainbow are remembered in this way (VIBGYOR- that stands for Violet, Indigo, Blue, Green, Yellow, Orange and Red). Mnemonic strategies for memory enhancement are too simplistic and perhaps underestimate complexities of memory tasks and difficulties people experience while memorising. In place of mnemonics, a more comprehensive approach to memory improvement has been suggested by many psychologists.

In such an approach, emphasis is laid on applying knowledge about memory processes to the task of memory improvement. Let us examine some of these suggestions. It is suggested that one must : (a) Engage in Deep Level Processing : If you want to memorise any information well, engage in deep level processing. Craik and Lockhart have demonstrated that processing information in terms of meaning that they convey leads to better memory as compared to attending to their surface features.

Deep processing would involve asking as many questions related to the information as possible, considering its meaning and examining its relationships to the facts you already know. In this way, the new information will become a part of your existing knowledge framework and the chances that it will be remembered are increased. (b) Minimise Interference : Interference, as we have read, is a major cause of forgetting and therefore you should try to avoid it as much as possible. You know that maximum interference is caused when very similar materials are learned in a sequence.

Avoid this. Arrange your study in such a way that you do not learn similar subjects one after the other. Instead, pick up some other subject unrelated to the previous one. If that is not possible, distribute your learning/practice.

This means giving yourself intermittent rest periods while studying to minimise interference.