Strategies for Improving Memory

In this essay, I will be describing and evaluating three strategies for the improvement of memory along with providing valuable evidence for the strategies. Theories of memory enable us to be able to understand the processes of encoding, storage and capacity, how stores are organized and why many of the information we learn is lost or is a major difficulty to retrieve in much more efficient way, therefore, allowing researchers to create and provide us with strategies to improve our memory. There are three known strategies for improving memory:

* Organization in memory

* Use of encoding the specificity principal (role of cues)

* Use of mnemonics

Organizing information into meaningful chunks can assist in the increase of the capacity of short-term memory and improving the long-term memory can be attempted by creating hierarchies to organize pieces of material into meaningful patterns. In the year of 1969, Bower et al asked a number of participants to learn a list of words. There were two separate groups, which were named the experimental group and the other being the control group. The experimental group saw the words organized into conceptual hierarchies while the control group saw the words being presented randomly. In a total number of four trials, participants saw 112 words and the results are that the experimental group recalled on average 73 of the 112 words correctly while the control group recalled only 21 words correctly. This showed that organization clearly helped with remembering given information in this study.

In a separate study, Bower and Clark (1969) both investigated another form of organization involving the use of a story.