How Can We Organise Our Thinking Essay

Psychologists who study the cordial process of imagineing, as well as perception, learning, memory and language, work in the area of cognitive psychology. Thinking is probably one of the most difficult processes to describe, as we think in three ways. We think in names and meaning semantic survey, we think in images by making mental pictures iconic thought and enactive thought based on impressions of actions, such as tying a shoelace. Our memory provides us with the ability to memorialise the past and things that we reserve learnt in the past. On a daily basis we are overloaded with reading, so how do we process it?Firstly, we potentiometer organise our thoughts by involving and using mental images which divine services us memorise better verbal and written selective information. So, we think close things by making a mental picture in our mind.When scratch line to learn the a new language, mental images are very facilitatory to learn the basic vocabulary. A very good exa mple of this is the lynchpin word technique. To explain this further, imagine a picture of a buzzer with a lid on it, which has a nasty smell, the French word is La Pou campanae, and is pronounced pooh-bell, which means bin in English. You can beca apply make a mental picture of yourself lifting the lid off of the bell shaped bin and saying pooh. This key word technique created by Michael Raugh and Richard Atkinson, who tasteed on two groups of participants, who were asked to learn a list of 60 Spanish words. The group that used the key word technique, when either participants were tested, scored an average of 88% and the group that did not use these key words scored 28%.This proves that the use of mental images help us remember things, and we can develop contrastive memory stagegies such as mnemonics, which are an aid or poetize to remember facts. An example of this is, to aid us when setting up a snooker table with the different coloured balls. Most of us bed all the red b alls go in the triangle, and the location of the black, pink and dirty balls. However, we do forget the order of the green, brown and yellow because they are primed(p) in a row of three next to each other. An booming mnemonic way to remember this order of balls is God Bless You.Second, another(prenominal) important way we can organise our thoughts is by putting them into categories. This is cognise as concept formation and is the process of developing mental representation by developing categories of a group of objects or events that share sympathetic properties. For example, the concept of animal, this concept contains other sub-concepts and thence further sub-concepts. You basin animals into birds, fish and mammals. Then, divide birds into robins, sparrows and owls etc. Using our concepts we can define the features that we fellow with birds, such as wings, feathers, beaks, flying.These defining concepts of a bird, do not have to be applied rigidly, as certain birds cannot fly, such as penguins and ostriches.Weston Bousfield conducted an experiment where participants were asked to learn a list of sixty words that could be divide into four categories. Example furniture, fruit, clothing and flowers. Although the words were presented in a ergodic order, the participants tended to remember them in groups which belonged to the same category,so if they remembered apple, they would remember peach, lemon and strawberry.This shows us that the information was available, but without the category clues given above, we cannot access all of this information. Now, when we try to reckon this information that has been arranged in to categories. Each piece of information then cues the next in turn, as it has been stored in our mind in an incorporate way, as opposed to a random and arbitrary way.Finally, schemas are a vital way to organise our thoughts, as they allow us to remember information about particular things. A schema is mental framework of knowledge devel oped as a result of exist, that can help us recall information that has been stored, and so provide more cues to go our memory. Hence, we file our knowledge about objects, situations, groups of people and ourselves into a large file cabinet in our mind.The term schema (plural schemas or schemata) that was used by Jean Piaget an influential Swiss psychologist, who spent over 50 years, look into the way children developed their thinking and cognitive skills, learning and memory.This was done by developing schemas which built up and developed by their result of experience in the world. Simply this means that our memory is a large file cabinet and each file in the cabinet is a schema. If you receptive a schema labelled going to the cinema it would contain all your knowledge about trips to the cinema. Buying a ticket, seeing a film, school term in the dark and eating popcorn. So, if you went to a cinema that you had not been to before, you would clean up your cinema schema file in your memory and this would accept the way.John Bransford and Marcia Johnson conducted an experiment, which illustrated the role of schemas.They asked participants to read a passage from a volume and recall it as accurately as they could. Half the participants were given the form of address of the passage and the other half without the claim of washing clothes.The title provides a schema, so that the information can be set deviation and remembered more easily.In conclusion, we have explored the ways that we think and the ways that organising our thoughts our can improve our memory. So, mental images give us pictures, concept formation puts information into groups of categories, and developing schemas, allows us to construct and remember mental packages about applicable information.Therefore, our memory is the key to how we function and who we are.