Strategies for memory improvement

Strategies for memory improvement

1. Pay attention

   • You are more likely to remember something if you attend to it

2. Elaborative rehearsal

   • Craik and Watkins
     • State maintenance rehearsal only serves to continuously reinsert the information into the STM. Elaborative rehearsal will make the information meaningful and so move the info into the LTM.

3. Organisation

   • Hierarchies
     • BOWER 1969
       • P's had to learn a list of words and some were told to do it using hierarchies whilst other were given no method.
         • Hierarchies= 65% recall
         • No hierarchies= 19% recall
   • Stories
     • BOWER AND CLARK 1969
       • Asked P's to learn 12 lists of 10 unrelated words either using the story method or no method
         • Story= 90% recall
         • No story= 10% recall

4. Avoiding interference effects

   • Retroactive interference
     • New information interferes with the old
     • Evidence comes from paired-association tasks when one word is associated with one word on list A and then a completely different word on List B.
       • P's asked to learn both lists and when asked to recall the paired associate form list A they would often use the word form list B
   • Proactive interference
     • When the old interferes with the new information
     • Evidence come from...
       • UNDERWOOD
         • Students who learn nonsense syllables showed a greater rate of forgetting ater 24 hours than would be expected .
           • He concluded that it was proactive interference causing the forgetting. The more students had taken part in similar tasks before the more they were likely to forget
       • MCGEOCH AND MACDONALD 1931
         • P's were asked to learn lists of adjectives and then compare their performance on recall tests after different delays.
           • Highest= similar adjectives were learnt
           • Lower= unrelated material
           • Lowest= Resting

5. Encoding Specificity Principle Tulving and Thompson 1973

   • GODDEN AND BADDELEY 1975 study on divers and context dependent retrieval
     • Findings
       • Those who learnt and recalled in the same location remembered the most words
     • Divers asked to learn words underwater or on land and then half were tested in either the same location or in a different location
   • Context dependent retrieval
   • State dependent retrieval

6. Mnemonics

   • Verbal
     • GLIDDEN ET AL = effective for children with learning difficulaties
     • ACRONYMS
       • CHUNKING
   • Visual imagery
     • O'HARA= long-term memory benefits for older adults using method of Loci
     • LOCI
       • Objects to places as retrieval cues
     • MIND MAPS
   • Limitations of Mnemonics research
     • Lab = lacks ecological validity