Activity 4.2

I think these exercises are a pretty good indication of the way my memory works. The exercises I did best on I had to be able to connect to something. For example, I did rather well with the letter recall because I used a strategy I often use for studying. We were given the letters NRVFTPLBH (D). As soon as I saw them I came up with this mnemonic “Not Really Very Fun Time People Let’s Be Honest.” This was much easier to recall than just a random string of letters. Another example is with the country recall. First of all, I’m awful at geography- sometimes the knowledge of this alone is enough to stress me out into not learning it. For this exercise Dr. Usher hypothesized that we would remember based on primacy, recency, and distinctiveness. I, instead, remembered them based on personal associations, for example I have a friend named Chad, I just watched a TV episode about Yemen, my best friend from high school and I used to love the name “Botswana”, and I have a friend whose brothers are adopted from Ethiopia. Finally, these exercises are also indicative of what stress will do to my memory. For some reason, when I receive information rapid fire I tend to get stressed and my brain “shuts down.” This is what usually happens when I get a bunch of numbers! I try chunking them, singing them, anything- but as each one comes I start to freak out. Interestingly, I also see this occur when administering cognitive assessments which have sections for short term and working memory. Students are given a list of numbers and then asked to recall the numbers. Even if they are doing well, once there gets to be a long list of numbers often they just shut down rather than trying.