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Memory can be defined as the process by which people encode, store and retrieve information. There are three stages in information processing; (encoding, storing and retrieval represents the process) somewhat operating like the way the computer operates. A simple diagram will help us understand the process.
INPUT ► ENCODING ► STORAGE ►RETRIEVAL
Input into memory
(Initial
recording of information) (Saved or held in memory for future use) recovery of
stored information
1. The first memory process is encoding: the transforming of information so that the nervous
system can process it. Encoding is
the process whereby information is thought to be put in memory.
Basically you use
your senses, i.e. hearing, sight, touch, taste, temperature, and others to
encode and establish a memory. You use acoustic codes when you try to
remember something by saying it out loud, or to yourself, repeatedly. For
example, in trying to remember the notes that make up the spaces in the treble
clef of a musical measure, you would repeat the letters “F,” “A,” “C,” and “E.”
When you attempt
to keep a mental picture of the letters, you are using visual codes. Another
way you might try to remember the notes is by using semantic codes. In
this way, you try to remember the letters by making sense of them. For example,
if you wanted to remember the letters “F,” “A,” “C,” “E,” you might remember
the word face. In this way, you have to remember only the word rather
than the individual letters.
2. After information is encoded, it goes through the
second memory process, storage. This is the process by which information is maintained over time. How
much information is stored depends on how much effort was put into encoding the
information and its importance. Information can be stored for a few seconds or
for much longer. Storage is the
maintenance of material saved in the memory system. It relates to the methods
assumed to be involved in the retention of information. If the material is not
stored properly, it cannot be recalled later.
3. The third memory process, retrieval,
occurs when information is brought to mind from
storage. The ease in which information can be retrieved depends on how
efficiently it was encoded and stored (as well as on other factors, such as
genetic background). Retrieval is a
recovery process through which material stored in memory is brought into
awareness and utilised. It is the process of recovering information from
memory. This term is synonymously used with recall and remembering. There are
three ways in which we recover information. These are recall, recognition and
relearning.
Recall: This depends upon active remembering of performances
learned previously e.g. poem, routines thus exam questions require recall- we
dig from memories.
Recognition This is where we are given a clue or shown on
formation from which we can remember something learned previously.
Relearning When something occurs after a lapse of time.
Note: Memory consists of learning, retaining and
remembering what was previously learned.
LEARNING AND MEMORY
Memory is a
term used to describe the activities of acquiring, retaining and recalling
knowledge. Memory aids learning in that for one to be regarded to have learned,
he or she should be able to retain and retrieve the stored information at the
time it will be required. Memory is therefore a bank for learned information.
Children who fail to tell what they have learned or fail to remember are said
not to have learned.
So far we
have looked at some of the concepts and terms associated with memory as well as
the definition of memory, let us now describe the three main types of memory.
Types of memory and techniques to enhance memory
Types of Memory
Like we
have types of different things on earth, there are also different types of
memory, each performing its own functions.
There are
three kinds of memory storage systems. These types of store-houses vary in
terms of their functions and length of time information is retained (Atkinson
and Shiffrin 1971). The following are the types;
a. Sensory Memory (Register)- this is
retrieval of information by the various sense organs.
(i) Iconic memory- ability of the eye to retain visual information after it has been
presented.
(ii) Echoic memory-refers to the ability of the ear to retain information after it has been
presented.
(iii) Semantic memory- refers to how we store our knowledge of the world around us by
encoding meanings not simply hard facts e.g. capital city of Zambia. Data
source (Roger Davies $Peter Houghton
(1995)
The
information in the sensory memory register remains there for only a fraction of
a second. Examples could be:
·
Faces of people in
the street, you do not remember them unless something special happens.
·
Hearing the sound
of a twig snapping or a flash of lightening.
Could you
think of other examples in our everyday life of how information is stored in
the sensory memory register?
b. Short
Term Memory (STM)
The major
function of the short term memory (STM) is to hold information long enough for
processing. It holds information for 15 to 20 seconds. The STM enables you to
grasp the meaning of a sentence even while you forget its precise words. It is
designed to deal with information in the active state and at the conscious
level. It is also called ‘operational memory’ because it
retains information called up for the more permanent long-term store.
Information
in STM is quickly lost unless placed through rehearsal and encoding in more
permanent store. STM has limited capacity. It can contain approximately seven
independent units of information.
Maintenance Rehearsal: To keep
information in short-term memory for more than a few seconds, you usually have to repeat the information to yourself or out
loud. This is what psychologists mean by maintenance rehearsal. When you look up a telephone number, for example, you can
remember the seven digits long enough to dial them if you repeat them several
times. If you are distracted or make a mistake in dialling, the chances are you
will have to look up the number again. It has been lost from short-term memory.
By using maintenance rehearsal (repeating the telephone number over and over
again), you can keep the information longer in short-term memory.
Psychologists have
measured short-term memory by seeing how long a participant can retain a piece
of information without rehearsal. The experimenter shows the participant three
letters, such as CPQ, followed by three numerals, such as 798, one second
later. To prevent rehearsal, the participant has been instructed to start
counting backward by threes and reporting the result in time with a metronome
striking once per second. (A metronome is an instrument designed to mark
exact time by a regularly repeated tick.) If the participant performs this task
for only a short time, she or he will usually remember the letters. If kept
from rehearsing for 18 seconds, however, recall will be no better than a random
guess; the information is forgotten. Short-term memory lasts a bit less than 20
seconds without rehearsal.
The moment you pay attention to information in sensory
memory, that information enters short-term memory. Then that information
remains in short-term memory for a few seconds. If you rehearse that
information, it stays; if you do not, it disappears. Below is a representation
of the process involved in memory.
Chunking: Short-term memory is limited not only in its duration but also in its capacity. It can hold only about seven unrelated items. Suppose, for example, someone quickly reels off a series of numbers to you. You will be able to keep only about seven or eight of them in your immediate memory. Beyond that number, confusion about the numbers will set in. The same limit is there if the unrelated items are a random set of words. We may not notice this limit to our capacity because we usually do not have to store so many unrelated items in our immediate memory. Either the items are related (as when we listen to someone speak), or they are rehearsed and placed in long-term memory.
The most
interesting aspect of this limit, discovered by George Miller (1956), is that
it involves about seven items (plus or minus two items) of any kind. Each item
may consist of a collection of many other items, but if they are all packaged
into one chunk, then there is still only one item. Thus we can remember about
seven unrelated sets of initials, such as COMSAT, DDT, SST, or the initials of
our favorite radio stations, even though we could not remember all the letters
separately. This is referred to as chunking because
we have connected, or chunked, them together; in other words, DDT is one item,
not three.
One of the tricks
of memorizing a lot of information quickly is to chunk together the items as
fast as they come in. If we connect items in groups, we have fewer to remember.
For example, we remember new phone numbers in two or three chunks (555-6794 or 555-67-94)
rather than as a string of seven digits (5-5-5-6-7-9-4). We use chunking to remember
visual as well as verbal inputs.
Even with
chunking, storage in short-term memory is only temporary. Information is
available, generally, for less than 20 seconds and no more than 30 seconds,
assuming no rehearsal has occurred. After that, it is part of the long-term
memory, or it is lost. Short-term memory contains information that is of
possible interest. Information worth holding on to must be rehearsed with the
intent to learn in order to transfer it to long-term memory. Rehearsal without
intent to learn yields no transfer.
The Primacy-Recency Effect: Read
the grocery list at the right. Immediately after reading this list, write down
as many of the items as you can. Which terms did you remember? The primacy-recency
effect refers to the fact that we are better able to recall information
presented at the beginning and end of a list. Most likely, you remembered the
first four or five items in the list because you had more time to rehearse
them. This is the primacy effect. You may have also recalled the last
four or five items in the list because they were still accessible in short-term
memory. This is the recency effect. However, you may have forgotten the
middle items in the list. When trying to remember the middle items in a list,
such as this one, your attention is split between trying to remember previous
items and trying to rehearse new ones.
Working Memory: Short-term
memory is also called working memory. Working memory serves as a system
for processing and working with current information. Working memory
includes both short-term memory (events that just occurred) and
information stored in long-term memory, now recalled for current information.
This is a
virtually permanent storage facility. Long-term memory refers to the storage of
information over extended periods of time. Once information has been
transferred from the STM to LTM, it remains there. It is the system of holding
information n received minutes, days or years ago or since childhood.
Information in LTM is not
stored like a piece of paper in a filing cabinet; it is stored according to
categories or features. You reconstruct what you must recall when you need it.
When you say a friend has a good memory, you probably mean he or she can recall
a wide variety of information accurately. The capacity of long-term memory
appears to be limitless. Long-term memory contains representations of countless
facts, experiences, and sensations. You may not have thought of your childhood
home for years, but you can probably still visualize it.
Human
memory is usually compared to a computer; however, unlike a computer, people
can never fill their long-term memories so full that there is no room left for
storage. In addition to this, the capacities of sensory
memory and short-term memory differ, as shown in the following table.
Types of Long-Term Memory: For almost
a century, the study of memory focused on how long information was stored for
usage. Then a Canadian psychologist, Endel Tulving (1972), proposed that we
have two types of memory.
Semantic memory is our
knowledge of language, including its rules, words, and meanings. We share that
knowledge with other speakers of our language.
Episodic memory is our
memory of our own lives, such as when we woke up this morning. Stored here are
personal things where the time of occurrence is important. Everyone’s episodic
memory is unique. L.R. Squire (1987) proposed a related model of memory.
Declarative memory involves
both episodic and semantic memory. This is information you call forth
consciously and use as you need it.
Procedural memory does not
require conscious recollection to have past learning or experiences impact our
performance. One form of procedural memory involves skills, learned as
we mature, including both complex skills such as swimming or driving a car and
simple skills such as tying a tie. As we gain a skill, we gradually lose the
ability to describe what we are doing. Other types of procedural memory, such
as fear of bugs, include habits and things learned through classical
conditioning.
Contents in the LTM have been worked upon and put into
meaningful or associative terms-i.e. the contents have been coded-this is
called retention. LTM has an infinite capacity, dependent only upon the
efficiency of the coding and organisation process of an individual. Below is a
representation of the process involved in memory.
Recall or rehearsal
Source: Denis Child (1997:153)
Enhancing memory
We cannot
learn anything if we could not remember. Good teaching helps in remembering and
bad teaching helps forgetting. If we are to help our pupils to remember what we
teach them, we need to teach them by good teaching methods that would help them
remember. Techniques for improving memory are based on efficient organisation
of the things you learn and on chunking information into easily handled
packages.
(a) Use of Meaningfulness and Association: A more efficient way of remembering new information involves elaborative rehearsal. In this method, you relate the new information to what you already know. The more meaningful something is, the easier it will be to remember. For example, you would be more likely to remember the six letters DFIRNE if they were arranged to form the word FRIEND. Similarly, you remember things more vividly if you associate them with things already stored in memory or with a strong emotional experience. The more categories a memory is indexed under, the more accessible it is. If an input is analysed and indexed under many categories, each association can serve as a trigger for the memory.
If you associate the new information with strong
sensory experiences and a variety of other memories, any of these stimuli can
trigger the memory. The more senses and experiences you use when trying to
memorise something, the more likely it is that you will be able to retrieve it,
a key to improving memory. In addition, how you originally learn or remember
something influences how readily you recall that information later. If a bit of
information is associated with a highly emotional event or if you learned this
bit of information in the absence of interference, you will more easily recall
that information because of the strength of that memory.
(b)
Mnemonic Devices: Techniques for using associations to memorise information are called mnemonic
devices. The ancient Greeks memorized speeches by mentally walking around
their homes or neighbourhoods and associating each line of a speech with a different
spot, called the Method of Loci. Once they made the associations, they could
recall the speech by mentally retracing their steps and picking up each line.
The rhyme we use to recall the number of days in each month (“Thirty days has
September”) is a mnemonic device. In the phrase “Every Good Boy Does Fine,” the
first letters of the words are the same as the names of the musical notes on
the lines of a staff (E, G, B, D, and F).
Another useful mnemonic device
is to form mental pictures. Suppose you have trouble remembering the authors and titles of books or which artists belong to
which schools of painting. To plant the fact in your mind that John Updike
wrote Rabbit, Run, you might picture a RABBIT RUNning UP a DIKE. To
remember that Picasso was a Cubist, picture someone attacking a giant CUBE with
a PICKAX, which sounds like Picasso (Lorayne & Lucas, 1974). Mnemonic
devices are not magical. Indeed, they involve extra work; making up words,
stories, and so on. The very effort of trying to do this, however, may help you
remember things.
(c)
Motivation-
We must stimulate the curiosity of the learners by providing interesting
activities from which learners can ask. This helps pupils to have the desire to
learn and pay attention, revise etc. Reward pupils in order to develop values
and positive attitudes towards learning.
(d)
Teaching from experience or known to unknown/. This helps remembering and learning.
(e)
Use of simple language- words that pupils can understand not difficulty
ones.
(f)
Practice/revision - in using new knowledge is essential for remembering what has been
learned e.g. maths multiplication and division may need practice after
teaching.
(g)
Repetition-
that teachers should ensure that their pupils repeat what they have learned
e.g. poems, word meanings, rhythmic teaching though there is a danger in its
use word meaning is not taken by pupils e.g. instead of pupils rhyming “weak and sinful though we be” pupils
may say “ we can sing, full though we be”
For similar reasons, a good way to protect memory from interference is to
over-learn it, i.e. to keep on rehearsing it even after you think you know it well.
Another way to prevent interference while learning new material is to avoid
studying similar material together. Instead of studying history right after
political science, study biology in between. Still, another method is to space
out your learning. Trying to absorb large amounts of information at one sitting
results in a great deal of interference. It is far more effective to study a
little at a time, called distributed practice.
(h)
Frequent testing/revision- helps the same way repetition does it. Children
should be taught to test themselves also so that they discover what they have
learned.
(i)
Using teaching and learning aids- children should also make and draw such things for
good remembering to take place.
(j)
Context learning-refers to the place in which teaching and learning is taking place e.g.
colours, noise, lighting etc. Memory is more effective when the conditions of
recall are identical at the time of learning.
(k)
Serial learning-
the teacher should look at the logical presentation of ideas and their
organisation e.g. introduction; body; conclusion. Emphasis should be put at
every stage to enhance learning.
Above all,
children cannot remember well what they have learned if they are hungry, sick
and bored. A healthy body is necessary as an alert mind for all kinds of
learning. Having enough sleep is vital for health memory.
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