The Use Of Mnemonics

In the section “Tips from the Science of Memory-for Studying and for Life”, found in our textbook, “Experience Psychology”, the Arthur Laura A. King discusses the importance of study habits. She addresses the skills needed to turn short-term memory into long-term memory through organizing, encoding, rehearsing and retrieving the information we study and memorize. “No matter what the model of memory you use, you can sharpen your memory by thinking deeply about the “material” of life and connecting the information to other things you know.” (King. 2013).

Mnemonic devices are techniques people can use to help improve their ability to remember something. There are various types of mnemonic devices people use to develop the associations. For example, the method of loci relies on visualizing mental images

How is memory encoded and what methods can lead to greater recall? There have been many different models suggested for human memory and many different attempts at defining a specific method of encoding that will lead to greater recall. In this experiment subjects are asked to do a semantic task on a word related to them and an orthographic task in which they analyze the letter in the word. The results of the experiment indicate that the words which where encoded semantically and are related to the self have greater recall.

* Semantic memory- general knowledge that is not tied to the time when information was learnt

Osewalt also suggests in her article, 5 Common Techniques for Helping Struggling Students, using mnemonics helps students to remember and apply concepts. Simple phrases are useful not only to those who struggle academically, but for all students.

Do you consider yourself to have a great memory or do you consider yourself to have a bad memory? Can you remember more than four phone numbers and more than three immediate family members birthdays without using any technology? If you cannot answer those simple questions than maybe you should reconsider on working on your memorization side of your brain. Joshua Foer, the author of The End of Remembering, and Paulo Freire, author of The “Banking” Concept of Education, both write about how important memory is in the world today. In Foer’s passage he states that before paper, books, and modern technology people were expected to remember any piece of information that was given to them. Now people rely on anything that could record information so they would not have to remember it or worry about forgetting. He believes that technology is running our memory. However in Freire’s passage he states that memorizing decontextualizes and is unrelated to present conditions, but memory can concrete conditions of our daily lives. The importance of memory and its functions in the world today is that it lets a person find self-identity, prevents shallow base of knowledge, and sets values.

Mnemonics can be detrimental in the sense that they often prevent students from truly understanding what it is they are learning. Instead of learning math, they are just learning a process.

In conclusion, I have looked at how we think and shown that by organising our thoughts we can improve our memory. Mental imagery allows us to use pictures, concepts allow us to categorise information, and by developing schemas we can compartmentalise relevant information about specific things.

Throughout the course of Health Information 371, we have looked at various tools that are used or could be used in the field to help design, build, and implement systems. These tools explored concepts that were mostly related to the medical standpoint on how to diagnose patient’s through decision-making techniques. This helps the health professional make an accurate diagnosis based off of evidence and not speculation. Within the Health Information field, as informatics specialists we need to consider all of these techniques when designing the systems, creating policies, and updating the servers. Having knowledge on these tools will assist us when creating technologies, which will give health professionals all the necessary techniques to give the patient the best possible care available. Four tools that I believe will have a significant potential to affect my approach while practicing

The influence of context on memory recall was examined in an experiment based on Godden and Baddeley’s (1975) Context Dependent Memory study. Previous research suggests that memory recall is improved when learning and recall occur in the same environment. The current experiment examined the importance of context and perceptual clues in memory recall by manipulating the learning and recall environments for a memory task using a list of 30 random words tested on three groups of participants: each group learnt a list of words in one environment and recalled them in

Schemas can help provide a cue to prompt our memory when coming to recalling information. We will have stored the information in a specific category so that it can be recalled more easily. One example of this is shown in an experiment carried out by John Bransford and Marcia Johnson (1972). Participants were read a passage which described in detail the process of washing clothes, however they were not told that the title was ‘washing clothes’. Many of the participants found that they had difficulty in understanding the passage and were unable to recall the details. However once the participants were given the title to the passage, this provided the schema which helped them to recall the information more easily.

Prior to the early 1970s the prominent idea of how memories were formed and retrieved revolved around the idea of processing memory into specific stores (Francis & Neath, 2014). These memory stores were identified as sensory memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory. In contrast to this idea, two researchers named Fergus Craik and Robert Lockhart proposed an idea linking the type of encoding to retrieval (Goldstein, 2015). This idea is known as the levels of processing theory. According to this theory, memory depends on the depth of processing that a given item is received by an individual (Goldstein, 2015). Craik and Lockhart stressed four points in supporting their theory. First, they argued that memory was the result of a series of analyses, each level of the series forming a deeper level of processing than the preceding level (Francis & Neath, 2014). The shallow levels of processing were believed to hold less importance and are defined as giving little attention to meaning of an item. Examples of which include focusing on how a word sounds or memorizing a phone number by repeating it over and over again (Francis & Neath, 2014) (Goldstein, 2015). The deeper levels processing involve paying close attention to the meaning of an item and relating that meaning to something else, an example of which would be focusing on the meaning of a word rather than just how the word sounds (Francis & Neath, 2014) (Goldstein, 2015). The second point Craik and Lockhart

Strategies and devices that help us remember information that requires effortful processing are: encoding its meaning, visualizing, and mentally organizing the

In daily life, memory is used all the time. When we go to buy things, we would remember the list of items what we are going to buy. At school, we would also need to have revision in order to remember the materials for examination. Or even, when we meet friends, we would also need to recall their names. Thus it is important to know and understand how we remember such things so that we can effectively recall them when necessary. Obviously, we do not need to remember the exact position or order of things in daily life. We would have our own pattern for remember and retrieve information (Ashcraft, 2010). This is named as free recall, which items recalled in any order (Francis, Neath, MacKewn and Goldthwaite, 2004). However, many researchers

About Mnemonics: Mnemonic devices are useful memory aids that can be applied to many different aspects of daily life. There are always certain tidbits of information that people just can’t seem to remember in the form they are presented. People rely on mnemonics when they create some association between that information they wish to remember and other concepts that they already know, or find easier to remember. The use of mnemonics has also been shown to be of significant value in the field of education. Manalo has shown that instruction using a specific type of mnemonics known as “process mnemonics” produced improvements of mathematical ability in students classified as learning disabled [3].Process mnemonics are used