Page 4 - LN 4_Human Memory

Mnemonics using organisation

▪ Organisation refers to imposing certain order on the material you want to

remember.

▪ Mnemonics of this kind are helpful because of the framework you create while

organization makes the retrieval task fairly easy. Two types-
1. Chunking

2. First Letter Technique

Chunking
➢ Chunking can increase the capacity of short-term memory.

➢ In chunking, several smaller units are combined to form large chunks.

➢ For creating chunks, it is important to discover some organisation

principles, which can link smaller units.

➢ Therefore, apart from being a control mechanism to increase the capacity
of short-term memory, chunking can be used to improve memory as well.

First Letter Technique

➢ In order to employ the first letter technique, you need to pick up the first

➢ letter of each word you want to remember and arrange them to form

another word or a sentence.
➢ For example, colours of a rainbow are remembered in this way (VIBGYOR-

that stands for Violet, Indigo, Blue, Green, Yellow, Orange and Red).

STRATEGIES BY PSYCHOLOGISTS

Engage in Deep Level Processing

▪ Craik and Lockhart have demonstrated that processing information in terms of

meaning that they convey leads to better memory as compared to attending to their
surface features.

▪ Deep processing would involve asking as many questions related to the

information as possible, considering its meaning and examining it relationships to

the facts you already know.