PSY 3001 W6 Assignment Pneumonic Devices
PSY 3001 W6 Assignment Pneumonic Devices
We think of memory as aPneumonic Devices in our lives. We often don’t choose what we
remember; our brain chooses for us. We give into the waves of time that sweep away
facts and details.
But the truth is, while the brain is extremely complex and we don’t know everything,
we do know some things about memory. We know enough to increase the chances of
someone retaining information if they consume information in the best way.
You can use this knowledge, too, to design courses with the mechanics of memory in
mind.
THE THREE STAGES OF MEMORY
Encoding is the process of receiving and processing
information. It turns the stimuli of the outside world into
information that we can understand. When you first
read a new fact and think, “Oh, that’s interesting,”
your brain is engaging with that information and
working on processing that fact with your knowledge
of the world. That’s encoding.
Storage is the stage in which information becomes
a record in our brain. This is when your brain has
processed the information enough for you to take that
information to the next stage of memory. Sometimes
it will only be stored for a short time, or never get
properly stored. The next section deals with the different types
of storage.
Retrieval is the process of taking information out of memory storage to use. Sometimes
if the information is really old, it will take more time to retrieve. When you’re thinking
“I know that fact! It’s on the tip of my tongue!” and finally recall it after a few moments,
that’s retrieval in action. There are ways retrieval can improve with pneumonic devices
and memory strategy.
Sensory memory is an unconscious, involuntary visual memory. It’s responsible for
certain sensory phenomena, such as when moving lights leave “light trails”. Sensory
assists our brain in having enough information to process into memory storage.
Short-term memory only holds a few items at once and lasts only up to 30 seconds. If
you want to test your short-term memory, have someone read to you a list of ten words
and see how many you can repeat back at the end of the list. Short-term memory is also
called working memory, since it’s the part of your memory that is actively working as
you go about your day. Stuff in short term memory can be moved to long-term memory
through various processes, which we will go over in the next section.
Long-term memory has a huge capacity. It contains anything that ever made it past
working memory into your brain. It’s like a gigantic filing cabinet, even if it’s a poorly
organized filing cabinet at times. It’s from this filing cabinet that we retrieve information.
Later, we’ll go over how you can help learners organize their “files” and practice finding
them so that they can retrieve information better.