How Can the Use of Mental Images, Concepts and Schemas Help Us to Organise Our Thinking and Improve Our Memory

847 Words4 Pages
How can the use of mental images, concepts and schemas help us to organise our thinking and improve our memory? Within this essay I am going to look at some of the ways that we organising our thoughts. I hope to examine how we organise these thoughts with the use of mental images, concepts and schemas. Initially I plan to explain what these mean and then look at each in more detail and how we use them to help us organise and improve our memory process. Without our memory it would make our living our everyday lives extremely difficult. The memory helps us process and recall important event, facts and allows us to learn and retain information both in the past and the future. A mental image is formed when we use or create a picture and use that picture to retain information. It is said within starting with psychology 2011 ‘that the more colourful, bizarre and complicated the image is, the more likely it is that we will be able to retain, store and recall it later. An example of this in Spoors et al (2011)’ is the use of the bell which produces an unpleasant smell which was used to remember the word ‘poobelle’ a word that apparently means bin in French. For example there was the experiment ‘cited in Spoors et al (2011)’ using the ‘keyword technique’ where two groups learnt 60 words One group learnt using the keyword technique and the other did not. Upon testing both groups, those participants’ that used the keyword technique scored an average 88%, by comparison with the other group who did not only scoring 28% therefore proving that mental images not only can but do improve our memory. We can also use mental images to remember shopping list by making up silly stories as in Spoors et al (2011) page 49. Mnemonics is another technique based on mental images that can be used for improving our memory. Several well known Mnemonics are cited within Spoors et al
Open Document