Psychology for Dummies (17 page)
Read Psychology for Dummies Online
Authors: Adam Cash
Tags: #Psychology, #General, #Body; Mind & Spirit, #Spirituality
The input component of cognitive processing is not really part of the thinking process at all. Actually, what I’m talking about here is perception. The input stage is the place where the information about the world around us gets “put” into our brains. Basically, all of that information “out there” has to get into our minds so we can think about it. How does it get there? Our senses: vision, audition, touch, smell, and taste input all of the information. Our senses serve as the input to thinking. Everything we see, hear, touch, smell, and taste about the world then becomes part of our thought processes. You can read more about perception in Chapter 5.
Thinking involves the manipulation of mental symbols that are stored as concepts, representations of the objects we encounter in our worlds. How are these mental symbols stored? Memory!
There are three separate storage systems in memory:
sensory memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory.
A useful metaphor here makes understanding memory a little bit easier. Envision a bank, you know, that thing that we keep our money in. Anyway, think about your bank. Most of us have a checking account, but we all know that there are other types of accounts as well. Each of these accounts does something a little different with our money. Basically, the bank stores our money and keeps it safe in different ways using different accounts. Checking accounts are typically for everyday and short-term use. Savings are for longer-term storage. Our memories store information in different ways as well.
Sensory memory
is a split second memory system that stores information coming in through your senses. Have you ever looked at the sun and then closed your eyes and looked away? What happens? You can still see a type of sun in your mind.
Short-term memory
(STM) consists of the information that is active in your consciousness right now; the things you’re aware of. The light on the book page, these words being read, the grumbling in your stomach, and the sound of traffic outside your window are all are parts of your conscious awareness and are all being stored in your STM. Things you are not aware of can be committed to longer-term storage or simply forgotten.
How much information can your STM store? The common consensus is that it can store seven items of information, plus or minus two items. This is sometimes called the “magical number seven” of STM capacity. Did you ever wonder why phone numbers are seven digits? The magical number seven is why!
Does that mean that I can only store seven words, seven numbers, or seven other simple items in my STM? No, thanks to a process called
chunking,
I can store a lot more information than that. A classic example of chunking is the use of
mnemonics,
where you take a big chunk of information and break it down into a little phrase, so it’s easier to remember.
Here’s an easy way to form a mnemonic. If you have a list of something you have to memorize, take the first letter of each word on the list and make a catchy phrase out of it. Here’s one I’ve never forgotten, and I learned it in eighth grade: Kings play chess on fine green silk. Do you know what that stands for? It stands for the way biologists classify different organisms on the earth: Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, and Species.
The duration of memory for the STM system is approximately 18 seconds. You can extend the length of time information can be kept in STM only by engaging in something called rehearsal.
Rehearsal
is the process of repeating something over and over again in your mind or out loud so that you don’t forget it.
If the information in STM is rehearsed long enough, it eventually ends up in your long-term memory storage system, the long-term memory. There are basically two different ways to deposit information into your long-term memory banks.
Maintenance rehearsal:
Transfers the information, from your STM, by repetition until it’s committed to long-term storage.
Elaborative rehearsal:
Your mind elaborates on the information, integrating it with your existing memories. When information is meaningful and references something that we already know, it is easier to remember and harder to forget.
Our LTM is broken down into three basic divisions:
Episodic memory:
Events and situations unique to your experiences (marriages, birthdays, graduations, car accidents, and so on)
Semantic memory:
Factual information such as important holidays, the name of the first president of the United States, and your Social Security Number
Procedural memory:
Information on how to do things like riding a bike, solving a math problem, or tying your shoes
Theoretically, the size and time capacity of LTM is infinite because researchers haven’t found a way to test its capacity. Just remember that it has enough capacity to get the job done. This sounds kind of strange, when you consider how much information we seem to forget. If the information is “in there” somewhere, why do we forget it?
Forgetting information stored in LTM is more of a process of not being able to access it rather than the information not being there. Two forms of access failure plague us when we fail to retrieve something from memory. Both of these access failures involve the inability to access a memory because other information gets in the way.
Retroactive interference:
Having a hard time remembering older information because newer information is getting in the way
Proactive interference:
Having a hard time remembering newer information because older information is getting in the way
The next time you watch a sitcom on television try to remember the details of the first 10 to 12 minutes, the middle 10 to 12 minutes, and the last 10 to12 minutes of the program. Or, listen to a lecture and try to remember what was said during the beginning, middle, and end of the presentation. You might notice something psychologists call the
serial position effect.
Information from the beginning and end of the show or lecture is easier to remember than the middle. Why is that?
The serial position effect occurs because the information at the beginning of the show or lecture is usually committed to long-term memory because of the amount of time that elapses. The information at the end of the show is being kept in your short-term memory because it’s fresh in your mind. The middle stuff? It’s just gone.
