Unit 4
Text A Improving Your Memory
Psychological research has focused on a number of basic principles that helps memory: meaningfulness, organization, association, and
visualization. It is useful to know how these principles work.
Meaningfulness affects memory at all levels. Information that does not make any sense to you is difficult to remember. There are several ways in which we can make material more meaningful. Many people, for instance, learn a rhyme to help them remember. Do you know the rhyme ―Thirty days has September, April, June, and November…?’’ It helps many people remember which months of the year have 30 days.
Organization also makes a difference in our ability to remember. How useful would a library be if the books were kept in random order?
Material that is organized is better remembered than jumbled information. One example of organization is chunking. Chunking consists of grouping separate bits of information. For example, the number 4671363 is more easily remembered if it is chunked as 467, 13, 63. Categorizing is another means of organization. Suppose you are asked to remember the following list of words: man, bench, dog, desk, woman, horse, child, cat, chair. Many people will group the words into similar categories and remember them as follows: man, woman, child; cat, dog, horse; bench, chair, desk. Needless to say, the second list can be remembered more easily than the first one. Association refers to taking the material we want to remember and relating it to something we remember accurately. In memorizing a
number, you might try to associate it with familiar numbers or events. For example, the height of Mount Fuji in Japan – 12, 389 feet—might be remembered using the following associations: 12 is the number of months in the year, and 389 is the number of days in a year (365) added to the number of months twice (24).
The last principle is visualization. Research has shown striking improvements in many types of memory tasks when people are asked
to visualize the items to be remembered. In one study, subjects in one group were asked to learn some words using imagery, while the second group used repetition to learn the words. Those using imagery remembered 80 to 90 percent of the words, compared with 30 to 40 percent of the words for those who memorized by repetition. Thus forming an integrated image with all the information placed in a single mental picture can help us to preserve a memory. (407 words) (7) (33) Text B
Short-term Memory
There are two kinds of memory: short-term and long-term. Information in long-term memory can be recalled at a later time when it
is needed. The information may be kept for days or weeks. Sometimes information in the long-term memory is hard to remember. Students taking exams often have this experience. In contrast, information in short-term memory is kept for only a few seconds, usually by repeating the information over and over. For example, you look up a number in the telephone book, and before you dial, you repeat the number over and over. If someone interrupts you, you will probably forget the number. In laboratory studies, subjects are unable to remember three letters after eighteen seconds if they are not allowed to repeat the letters to themselves.
Psychologists study memory and learning with both animal and human subjects. The two experiments here show how short-term
memory has been studied.
Dr Hunter studied short-term memory in rats. He used a special apparatus which had a cage for the rat and three doors. There was a
light in each door. First the rat was placed in the closed cage. Next, one of the lights was turned on and then off. There was food for the rat only at this door. After the light was turned off, the rat had to wait a short time before it was released from its cage. Then, if it went to the correct door, it was rewarded with the food that was there. Hunter did this experiment many times. He always turned on the lights in a random order. The rat had to wait different intervals before it was released from the cage. Hunter found that if the rat had to wait more than ten seconds, it could not remember the correct door. Hunter’s results show that rats have a short-term memory of about ten seconds.
Later, Dr. Henning studied how students who are learning English as a second language remember vocabulary. The subjects in his
experiment were 75 students at the University of California in Los Angeles. They represented all levels of ability in English: beginning, intermediate, advanced, and native-speaking students.
To begin, the subjects listened to a recording of a native speaker reading a paragraph in English. Following the recording, the
subjects took a 15-question test to see which words they remembered. Each question had four choices. The subjects had to circle the word they had heard in the recording. Some of the questions had four choices that sound alike. For example, weather, whether, wither, and wetter are four words that sound alike. Some of the questions had four choices that have the same meaning. Method, way, manner, and system would be four words with the same meaning. Some of them had four unrelated choices. For instance, weather, method, love, and result could be used as four unrelated words. Finally the subjects took a language proficiency test.
Henning found that students with a lower proficiency in English made more of their mistakes on words that sound alike; students with
a higher proficiency made more of their mistakes on words that have the same meaning. Henning’s results suggest that beginning students hold the sound of words in their short-term memory, while advanced students hold the meaning of words in their short-term memory. (548 words) (6) (27)
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