Psychological research has focused on a number of basic principles that help memory:m
Meaningfulness affects memory at all levels.Information that does not make any sense to you is difficult to remember.There are several ways in which we can make material more meaningful.Many people, for instance, learn a rhyme to help them remember.Do you know the rhyme "Thirty days has September, April, June, and November..."? It helps many people remember which months of the year have 30 day s.
Organization also makes a difference in our ability to remember.How useful would a library be if the books were kept in random order? Material that is organized is better remembered than jumbled information.One example of organization is chunking.C hunking consists of grouping separate bits of information.For example, the number 4671363 is more easily remembered if it is chunked as 467, 13, 63.Categorizing is another means of organization.Suppose you are asked to remember the following list of wor ds: man, bench, dog, desk, woman, horse, child, cat, chair.Many people will group the words into similar categories and remember them as follows: man, woman, child; cat, dog, horse; bench, chair, desk.Needless to say, the second list can be remembered mo re easily than the first one.
Association refers to taking the material we want to remember and relating it to something we remember accurately.In memorizing a number, you might try to associate it with familiar numbers or events.For example, the heigh t of Mount Fuji in Japan -12,389 feet -might be remembered using the following associations: 12 is the number of months in the year, and 389 is the number of days in a year (365) added to the number of months twice (24).
The last principle is visualizati on.Research has shown striking improvements in many types of memory tasks when people are asked to visualize the items to be remembered.In one study, subjects in one group were asked to learn some words using imagery, while the second group used repetiti on to learn the words.Those using imagery remembered 80 to 90 percent of the words, compared with 30 to 40 percent of the words for those who memorized by repetition.Thus forming an integrated image with all the information placed in a single mental pict ure can help us to preserve a memory.
1.What kind of information is easy for us to remember?()
A.Information that does not make any sense to us
B.Information that we are not familiar with
C.Information that is meaningful to us
D.Information that we are not interested in
2.Which of the following pairs are rhymes?()
A.horse—house
B.right---white
C.come----home
D.how---low
3.The second list of words in para.3 is organized according to().
A.the rhyme
B.the word category
C.th e first letters of words
D.the meanings
4.Books are kept in a library().
A.according to their size
B.in random order
C.in a jumbled way
D.in different categories
5.What method can better help form. a whole mental picture about the ti ngs to be remembered?()
A.Grouping
B.Repetition
C.Imagery
D.Association