Cognitive Psychology: Memory, Thinking And Language

Cognitive Psychology: Memory, Thinking and Language

Cognitive psychology is the science of how the mind is organized to produce intelligent thought and how it is realised in the brain (Anderson, 2009). This essay looks to examine the key areas of cognitive psychology and their implications for third level students. There are three key areas to cognitive psychology; memory, thinking and reasoning and language. Third level students face many challenges in their day to day lives and third level education can be a difficult feat to get used to. For the most part third level students are school leavers who are entering the third level system for the first time. However, under this title of 'third level student' we also find mature students, we

When we look at memory there are three different types; sensory, short-term and long-term, each of which are all different but equally crucial in the memory process. Information must pass through all these in order to be stored permanently. Sensory memory is the first stage that information must pass through. Sensory memory can only store information for a brief amount of time and is constantly being overwritten by new information. If the information does not move from sensory memory to short-term memory it will be lost entirely. The next stage is short-term memory. This is the first stage where the information we take in has meaning and it can be held here for fifteen to twenty seconds. As Anderson (2009) stated short term memory has a limited capacity to hold information. At one time, its capacity was recognized with the memory span. Memory span refers to the number of elements that a person can immediately repeat back. Depending on the person it is said that our short-term memory can hold five to nine chunks or pieces of information. Feldman (2010) defines a chunk as a meaningful grouping of stimuli that can be stored as a unit in short-term memory. Information can be kept in short-term memory through repetition, but if we wish for this information to move to long-term memory we must use a process of elaborative rehearsal. "Elaborative rehearsal occurs when the information is considered and organised in some fashion" (Feldman, 2010). Elaborative rehearsal is important as it is a key factor that allows information to pass from short-term to long-term memory. Long-term memory is the third and final stage of memory, here information can be stored on a fairly permanent basis, but it is the retrieval of this information that can be the difficult part. There are four different components to long-term memory; declarative memory, semantic memory, episodic memory and procedural