Question

post a 1,000-1,250-word essay that applies memory strategies to your daily life. Include the following:

Explain cognitive mapping and one other memory strategy of your choosing from the course materials.

Explain at least two positive effects of using each memory strategy in daily life.

Answer 1

The term Cognitive map was coined by Tolman while explaining Latent learning. Cognitive map is the mental representation of external environment, learned content or a landmark. While learning or memorizing something, an individuall uses cues from the environment and utilizes it in creating a mental image. Tolman and Honzik (1930) conducted an experiment where they built a maze to investigate latent learning in rats. The study took three groups of rats. All the three groups of rats were made to run through the maze. First group received reinforcement in form of food at the end of maze, the second group did not receive any reinforcement and the third group received reinforcement at the 11th day. This experiment continued for 17 days.The result were very interesting:

i). The grioup that did not receive any reinforcement, showed no improvement.

ii).The group that received reinforcement for all 17 days showed persistent progress.

iii). The third group that received reinforcement on 11th day started showing improvement and performed even better than the group that received reinforcement for al 17 days. Thus the study shows that these rats created a cognitive map in their mind and had learned the path earlier. The third group showed learning only when the reinforcement was available and this phenomenon is known as latent learning.

1. Method of Loci is a memory strategy which is based on cognitive map. This strategy uses cognitive map while memorizing things. For example: You want to buy some material such as spices, a nootbook, a soap and a sofa cover. You first go to kitchen in order to memorize spices, secondly you go to your study room to memorize nootbook and after that you walk through the bathroom to drawing room. Thus you take cues in form of space and create a cognitive map to memorize all the material that you want to buy. While you are out for shopping, you use the cognitive map that you created for memorizing the material you want to buy.

2. First letter technique: This is another strategy to memorize a content. While applying first letter technique, you use the first letter of all the words that you want to remember and make a new word. For example, if you want to remember the names of all the colours of rainbow, you take first letter from all the seven colours: Violet, Indigo, Blue, Green, Yellow, Orange and Red, and make a new word i..e. "VIBGYOR".

Positive effects of the aforementioned memory strategies:

1. A) .When you walk a market, you just need to take a mental walk of the route that you created in form of cognitive map and you will be able to remember each obeject easily.

B). Cognitive map is not easily forgetable once it is created. Thus any thing that has been memorized with this method is easy to retrieve.

2. A). First letter technique is best while memorizing things or contents that are in order.

B). Complex learning contents are memorized easily by applying this method.