Psychology: Human Memory

In the social networking course, we have discussed about four basic principles of memory. In my student’s life, we’re always using our brain to try to memorize things and principles as many as possible. So I want to start with my memory experience in this blog.

 

Pro. Chan had provided us with four basic principles about memory below.

 

1、  Assumption of a limited capacity of the mental system.

Although we want to memorize everything, we know it is impossible. At the beginning of studying English, I felt it was difficult to memorize all English words. As spoken in this course, our memory capacity is limited. When the number of information attains some point, the brain is restricted to memorize other things. So if my restriction point is 100 words per day, I won’t be able to memorize more than 100 words. But according to my experience, this restriction will be improved if you are enthusiastic to exercise your memory capacity. And this capacity is actually related to individual’s talent. But I still believe that this capacity is limited in some range because everyone forget some things and vast of human’s memory will conform some regulation like Ebbinghaus Curve below.

 

2、There is a control mechanism to government the encoding, transformation, processing, storage, retrieval and utilization of information.

This principle actually describes that it’s more difficult to complete a new task than a routine task. And more processing power is required in a new environment. It’s easy to understand this principle. When we do one thing again and again, we will try to memorize it again and again. So it has more chances to be processed in our brain and more probability to be memorized. In the process of repeating, we can find easier way to complete task and know all the steps by the right order to deal with this type task. So experience is important to encounter with the task and at this,  experience is equal to former memory.

 

3、 There is a two-way flow of information as we try to make sense of the world around us.

The cognition from the senses and information we have stored in memory helps us memorize some things. It’s easy to understand. The things relative to our life is easy to find the regulation to have a long-term memory.

 

4、Human organism has been genetically prepared to process and organize information in specific ways.

In the course, Pro. Chan made an example about infants. A non-experienced infant always behave differently from adults. When a strange human comes out before infants, they will have attention to his face at first. In contrast, an adult will pay attention to other parts of the human according to his own interest, probably such as hair, cloth, dress or shoes.

 

Human memory research is important to social networking. In order to create a popular website, the question what can attract the users and stimulates users to memorize the website is required to solve.