Teachers College, Columbia University

HUDK 4029: Cognition and Learning

Final, Fall 2013
Kate Hibbard

Thats Not My Name

Six Tricks of the Mind:
Thinking Skills Selected to Help Weak Memories Mind the Gaps
I was out unusually late the other night at a Potluck. In the heat of the
kitchen and the noise of the party, I accidently locked eyes with a
strangely familiar woman. Usually, I avoid encounters like this. If
anyone mildly familiar catches my eye, I turn on the avoidance
behavior: I avoid eye contact, pretend that something has caught my
attention, look away as if fascinated by something else, and then do
my best to blend into the scenery. Why behave in such a ridiculous
way? Well, its because I am too embarrassed to admit that I cant
remember names.
Recalling a name takes as much effort as reaching a pen that Ive
accidently dropped to the bottom of a marsh. I have to lean out over
the edge of the canoe and feel around in the dark waters, through the
muck, grasping for a tiny shimmer of a thing. I think its there, but
cant be sure and that that mild familiarity is haunting. Kind of
knowing a person is worse than not knowing them at all. Knowing or
not knowing is safe. There is a kind of confidence that one can pull
from a state of certainty helps guide us from one socially acceptable
interaction to the next. If I didnt know her, I could approach and
introduce myself. If I did I could approach and enthusiastically the last
place wed seen each other and marvel at how much time had passed,
etc. Either way, whether I know or dont know her name, I can at least
walk over and say hello. However, not knowing whether I know or not,
which happens to me more often than I care to admit, paralyzes me.
Issues around metacognition expand beyond my personal
struggles with mild familiarity at a party and the awkwardness that
ensues. Ambiguity of knowledge is paralyzing. It freezes decision
making at all levels. Take for example the momentary blindness the
post-Sandy blackout caused the for the aid providers like the Red
Cross. They were not able to bring supplies to those who most
desperately needed it until three sometimes seven days after the

store because they didnt have enough information to confidently know

where to send supplies. Similarly, the international stock exchange,
housed in downtown Manhattan, suffered a momentary blip of chaos in
the heartbeat of the stock exchange as Sandy rattled its windows and
wiring. The pulse of the capitalist economy trembled in the shadow of
that storm because information could not be transferred faithfully until
the storm had passed. The world had to wait until the storm passed.
And lets not forget how the lack of knowledge about what we knew
after the 9/11 attacks led the American public to make the terribly
informed decision of consenting to the War in Afghanistan and the Iraq.
The massive investment in datamining that Edward Snowden revealed
from within the National Security Agency alone, hints at how much our
government cannot risk such metacognitive failures in their system.
We live in an age where information has become our most valuable
asset. Some might argue that an inability to know exactly what you
know is one of our greatest weaknesses and a lack of information is our
greatest threat. Im sure the NSA would agree with me on this. The
paralyzing ambiguity, which I am calling here the metacognition
problem, that haunts my social life and plagues our congress, needs to
end. This paper considers six thinking skills as suggestions as to how
these gaps in our metacognition can be filled.
Beginning with thinking skills that can serve to address the
surface of the metacognition problem, I will describe thinking skills of
verbal overshadowing, avoiding assumptions, and building a social
vocabulary. While these thinking skills may prove useful, they are also
ridiculous because they offer a temporary solution to the
metacognition problem and require behavior that is unnatural and
excessive. The concluding three thinking skills presented here-in will
hopefully prove to be more long lasting solutions to the metacognition
problem, for they have the potential to address the problem at its
roots. These thinking skills involve semantic networks, situation
models, and depth of processing.
To begin at the surface; the most straight-forward strategy for
remembering a persons name is verbal overshadowing. If an
experience is described verbally, then a person is more likely to
remember the event; this is called verbal overshadowing (Carmichael,
Hogan, and Walter, 1932). Employing this strategy at the Potluck would
involve repeating a persons name aloud over and over again if

necessary to assist in the transfer of the name from short-term to

long-term memory. I imagine that I would find excuses to restate the
persons name several times in conversation upon initially meeting
them. Perhaps I would say, Sahira? Wow, Sahira, what an interesting
name Sahira is. Does the name Sahira have historical significance? Am
I pronouncing it correctly, Sahira? Learning this thinking skill would
not be a challenge for most people as long as they were willing to
swallow their pride and come across as a little redundant and a bit
ridiculous upon introduction.
Results from the Carmichael, Hogan, and Walter experiments are
more complicated, however, because the studies also showed that
verbal description can influence the accuracy of the recollection.
Schooler & Engstler-Schooler (1990) demonstrated that verbalization
can render inaccurate recollection when the events to be remembered
are difficult to put into words. They have demonstrated this in a variety
of ways. For example, when participants viewed faces while using
verbal overshadowing, recollection of the faces was notably more
accurate than when verbal overshadowing was not employed. Faces
being complex cognitive images with both cultural and psychological
connotations adding to the inordinate amount of information they offer
our minds that defy a simple one-word description. Thus, a person
who is not already in possession of a developed sense of facial
recognition would not benefit from verbal overshadowing. The skill
would help them remember the name of the person, but not the face;
the opposite of the metacognitive problem that I am struggling with.
However, while faces may prove too complex to recall using
verbal overshadowing, other complex concepts may not be. Another
example taken from the Schooler & Engstler-Schooler studies revealed
that people can use verbal overshadowing as a preparatory thinking
skill to be used in anticipation of a transfer from short-term to long
term memory, rather than a reactionary thinking skill used in the
moment. In their study, participants were asked to describe the tastes
of wine, some of which are notorious for their complex flavors.
Untrained wine drinkers (i.e. people who had not developed a
vocabulary concerning tastes and flavors of wine) struggled to
accurately describe the wines they had had. However, wine drinkers
familiar with vocabulary, typically used to describe wine flavor, were
able to recall wines distinctly. These test results suggest that a person

can improve their ability to remember a complex experience if they

verbally overshadow the experience in advance. People with prior
experience are thus more likely to have built the vocabulary necessary
to more accurately recall the new information. Politicians, for example,
meet new people on such a regular basis that Im sure most of them
have developed quite a capacity for remembering new names as a
result of verbal overshadowing; however, this does not mean that the
average person cannot master this same level of cognitive capacity
through practice.
I could improve my retention of a persons name if I had
employed verbal overshadowing before going to the Potluck. Studying
names in preparation for a social event in order to broaden my
vocabulary of names might feel ridiculous at first, but the studies
described above suggest that this practice will help my mind become
more comfortable recalling names at will. If I could get over my strange
habit of social avoidance and occasional paralysis, I might not need to
study-up for parties. The practice of learning and attempting to recall
names alone might act as the verbal overshadowing I need to better
recall names in the future. With time and practice, I would develop a
broader vocabulary of names and probably simultaneously experience
an improvement in my ability to remember names.
Another thinking skill I might use to aid my memory is to make
an effort to not randomly guess her name. That is, to not stretch my
mind out to all the possibilities that might be the name of that
beautiful woman across the room. Its important that I dont randomly
guess, because forced recall such as this can lead to false memories,
which would only make my situation worse. Jacoby et al. (1989) and
Roediger, Wheeler, and Rajaram (1993) give evidence for this
hypothesis, although neither group used comparison groups when
performing these tests, unfortunately.
Roediger et al. used a forced recall procedure in which test
participants were made to randomly guess while recalling a list of
words. Later, when asked to rate all the words they had listed as to
whether these were actually words that had occurred during the study
phase of the experiment, they found that participants who had
guessed often believed their incorrect answers had actually occurred.
Their guesses had distorted their memories.

In another study, involving hypnotism, participants who had been

hypnotized proved more likely to remember a false memory if they or
someone speaking to them during hynosis had suggested the idea or
memory (Schacter, 1995). Schacter noted,
The evidence suggests that hypnosis creates a retrieval
environment in which people are more willing than usual to call a
mental experience a memory, and in which they express a
great deal of confidence in both true and false memories.
The ease with which a person can create and accept false memories as
realities is remarkable. I have certainly experienced this phenomenon
myself, although not under hypnosis. Having lived in the same
neighborhood for almost two years now, I have had to recall where I
last parked my car about twice a week, on average, which has given
me a lot of little tiny blinking memories telling me where my car was
parked. I remember the time that my car was park on St. Marks, on
Prospect, on Dean, on Carlton between Prospect and Dean etc. Often,
when its time to remember where I last parked my car last, my mind
offers up all these possible places I could have parked it, like it is
guessing. I can feel myself scanning through these memories, as I walk
down the street, trying to discern the most recent memory from all the
others. But of course, as Im offering these memories up for myself to
consider as I am guessing I am also slowly erasing the original
memory and replacing it with one that I have accidently chosen to
accept. Sometimes, I can actually feel myself doing this; displacing my
memories with new ones. Remembering the beautiful womans name is
a similar process. The more I struggle to guess, the harder it is for me
to remember what I actually know. Thus, the second thinking skill I
offer for your consideration is not to guess. Not only does it minimize
ones chances of recalling the truth, it is also terribly embarrassing
when to have guessed wrong. Try another strategy.
One question that haunts me is whether this is just the way I am.
Will I forever fumble the names of the people I have met? Must I resign
myself to hiding in the corner; unable to make the right move because
that line, Do I know you from somewhere? is too clich to be
attractive? Whorf considered the issue of linguistic determinism in
1956, when he became impressed by the way different languages

emphasized different values in their structure (i.e. their syntax). Does

language determine the way our minds process information or does
the way our minds process information determine our language? He
concluded the emphasis in a language must influence the way its
speakers think about the world. These conclusions were drawn from
mere observation and unfortunately no replicable studies were
performed to confirm Whorfs observations. Yet, perhaps my language
acquisition has limited me in my capacity to recall and retain peoples
names simply because I have a limited vocabulary; my mind might be
limited by its language. If language has indeed determined or at least
strongly influenced my thinking, or as Whorf puts it, the way that I see
the world, then perhaps I need to go beyond the simple thinking skills
of verbal overshadowing and avoidance of guessing in order to
improve my memory, perhaps I need to reform the language that I use
to think about the people I meet in order to better remember their
names.
Fortunately, Whorfs observations were further explored through
experimentation in years that followed. In a study done by Rosch
(1973), the language of the Dani a people from Indonesian New
Guinea, who have two words for colors: mola for bright and warm hues,
mili for dark and cool hues were compared to English speakers by
comparing their abilities to learn nonsense words for focal colors (i.e.
colors that are predominantly used as typical of their type: the reddest
red would be a focal color for red as would the greenest green for
green). Using nonsense words to eliminate the influence of language
on the labeling process and isolate the cognitive recognition of the
focal colors, the study examined whether people with minds that had
developed under different languages understood or perceived colors
differently. Results showed that participants uniformly identified focal
colors no matter what their language, thus suggesting that our eyes
and brains detect color similarly and that no matter what language we
speak our brains identify stimuli in a similar manner. This would
suggest my unusual inability to recall names is not a sign that there is
something wrong with my brain. My brain could be just fine (fingers
crossed). It may mean that I have a language or a personal
vocabulary within my language that makes it difficult for me to
distinguish between things, like the correct or incorrect memory of a
persons name, but that might be easier for others with a different use

of language to distinguish between. Roschs studies suggest that it is

possible that I cant easily distinguish between accurate memories and
false memories because of my language.
Section British Color Spectrum (represented as a bar)
British word for green

British word for yellow

Section Berinmo Color Spectrum (represented as a bar)

Berinmo word for

Berinmo word for wor

nol

Roberson, Davies, and Davidoff explored this very matter in

2000, in a study that compared British participants to a group of
participants from Papua New Guinea who speak Berinmo, a language
that has seven basic color groups. They found that both groups easily
recalled focal color groups regardless of language; thus, supporting
Roschs 1973 findings. However, the different languages did have an
affect on the participants observations of color boundaries. The
researchers examined distinctions that were important (i.e. assigned
value by because the color was assigned a word) in language and not
the other. For example, Bernimo speakers consider the British word for
the color green as two different colors: wor and nol. British speakers
draw their distinction between green and yellow in the middle of the
spectrum that Bernimo identifies as the color wor.
When speakers of these two languages were asked to learn to sort
stimuli at the boundaries between wor and nol and green and yellow,
researchers observed that the two groups found it easier to learn to
distinguish between colors divided along the categories that were
established by their language. In other words, English speakers found it
easiest to sort stimuli at the green-yellow boundary, whereas Bernimo
speakers could make distinctions along the war-nol divide more
efficiently. Both language speakers could make the same color
distinctions (Rosch, 1973), but they found it harder to make
distinguishing observations along lines for which they had not
previously established language.
These findings support those of Carmichael, Hogan, and Walter
as well as those of Schooler & Engstler-Schooler in regards to verbal
overshadowing, but they point to a thinking still that addresses the
metacognitive problem at a deeper level. Verbal overshadowing is the
7

practice of verbally describing an experience in order to better retain a

recollection of the event in long-term memory. Roschs work coupled
with the studies of Roberson, Davies, and Davidoff suggest that our
ability to distinguish is defined by the language we use to describe the
world around us. If I can cultivate an internal language (i.e. a broader
vocabulary) around the memories I want to distinguish between, then I
will have a greater capacity for remembering them. This means that
instead of just studying a list of names, as if I was studying for a
entrance exams into medical school or the Bar (i.e. using verbal
overshadowing), I would work to generate an entire vocabulary around
peoples names, faces, and identities.
I have a personal and rather embarrassing example of what
happens when we dont have the language to distinguish; although,
this is not my story, it comes from my father. At a celebratory
gathering of Harvard alumni many years ago, my father was
approached by a former peer of his, with whom he had taken several
business classes, and had graduated with in the same year. This
person happened to be Deval Patrick, the current governor of
Massachusetts. Even back then, my father should have remembered
his name, but he didnt. Instead, my father greeted and addressed
Deval by the name of the one of the other black students in the
program. Without missing a beat, Deval smiled, reminded my father of
his real name, and added, Its alright. We all look the same. My
father was mortified. Up until that moment, he hadnt realized how
limited he was in his exposure to people of color. His exposure had
been so limited, in fact, that his mind had difficulty distinguishing
between people that were not white, even classmates with whom hed
studied and seen on a regular basis he easily confused. My father isnt
the only one with limited language and recall abilities as the result of
racial segregation. People often report not being able to tell the
difference between people of Asian decent or Hasidic Jews. Ethnic
segregation leads to a host of systemic problems; a limited capacity to
distinguish between people is only the beginning of an array of
problems them stem from our inability to see each other as individuals,
but instead as ethnic groups or stereotypes.
My parents raised me in an all white neighborhood because it
was located in a great school district. I spent my years at school
attending classes almost entirely filled with white children until I was

16 years old and in high school. My high school not only had a high
diversity quota, but it bussed students in from the inner city. Suddenly,
I was making friends with black and brown classmates. It was exciting,
but, like my father, I confused them often. I had grown-up in a
segregated society and had not developed a language (i.e. a personal
vocabulary) to help my mind distinguish between faces of color. When I
first started making friends with people of color, I am deeply
embarrassed to say, their faces looked remarkably similar to me. As I
spent time with Offiong, Andrew, Jamie, and Anthony I learned and I
believe I could actually feel my mind growing its ability its language
for distinguishing between them. Looking back on that learning
experience now, I cant believe that I was ignorant enough to look at a
black persons face and honestly be unable to accurately distinguish
them from the next black person I saw, but there it is. My father and I
have both suffered from an extremely limited social vocabulary.
Hopefully, these personal stories serve to better illustrate the
problem, but they only scratch the surface and dont reflect the depth
and the horrors that a limited cognitive social vocabulary can lead to.
The work to tear down the racial segregation that so often pits people
on either side of the divide against each other, sometimes begins with
distinguishing the individuals from the group and seeing the people
instead of the stereotype. Often we call this recognizing the humanity
within, but this may be grandiose language given to a process that
could be described in more simple terms as the process of paying
attention to the characteristics that make a person unique. Perhaps
this would involve the practice on noticing a persons distinguishing
features or asking about characteristics of their life that I can relate to.
Perhaps this is a matter of learning about these characteristics as if I
need to know them, rather than simply learning them as a formality;
like the difference between learning to drive a car while watching it on
video verses while sitting behind the wheel. Remembering a person is
as important as remembering a name.
Much of our knowledge and memories are filed away in our longterm memory by linking it to what we already know. As previously
discussed, the number of experiences with different people often
strengthens our cognitive capacity to recall and distinguish between
people and their names; however, another thinking skill that addresses
the metacognitive problem at a deeper level is a semantic network.

These are networks of meaning used to encode conceptual knowledge

in a hierarchy of relationships that makes them more easily retrievable.
Quillian (1966) proposed that people store information about various
categories in a hierarchical network structure. Characteristics that are
true of the categories are associated with those categories.
Characteristics that are true of higher-level categories are also true of
lower level categories. For example, beavers and goats are both with-in
a larger category of mammals, but only beavers reside in water
therefore water is part of a lower-level category associated with, but
underneath beaver. Water is not a describing characteristic of goats,
therefore it would not associated with goats in this semantic network.
mammals
goats

beavers
water

Collins and Quillian (1969) did an experiment to test the

psychological reality of semantic networks by having participants think
about and determine the truth of assertions about concepts, for
example
1. Mammals are beavers.
2. Mammals have live in water.
3. Apples have hoofs.
Participants had to indicate whether a statement was true of false by
pressing one of two buttons. Collins and Quilian measured the amount
of time it took participants to press the buttons. If categorical
knowledge was structured as outlined in the image above, then we
would expect sentence 1 to be verified faster than sentence 2, which
would be verified more quickly than sentence 3. These expectations
outline almost exactly what Collins and Quilian found. A study done by
C. Conrad (1972), almost in conversation with Collins and Quilian,
found that the regularity with which a person experiences something
has a strong influence on its retrieval time.
These studies show us that retrieving information can often take
time. I often experience this myself. After leaving a party, I will smack

10

my forehead at the realization that I now have the womans name in

my memory. Why wasnt it there when I needed it!? Well, possibly
because it was at the bottom of a long semantic network. It takes more
time to recall a word that is at the other end of a semantic web from
where you started. Perhaps all I need is to give myself time to let my
thoughts travel the full length of a semantic network in order to get the
name I need. It is possible that I start to guess a persons name (as
described above) before giving my cognition the time it needs to
remember. This may be a systemic problem in our modern society.
Advances in technology have made habit the assumption that
information retrieval should be instantaneous. High speed Internet is
an ever increasing assumed normalcy. Internet users wait for mere
seconds, sometimes only a single second, for a video or website to
load before giving up and moving on to something faster. We cant
assume that our brains work in a similar manner. We have forgotten
that thinking skills often require time. However, the work of Collins,
Quilian and Conrad suggest that the amount of time our minds need to
retrieve information is malleable, almost programmable. Together,
these studies enable us to draw the conclusions that (a) the more often
we encounter a concept, the higher the concept will be stored on a
semantic network and the more accessible it will be, (b) the more
frequently a fact about concept is encountered, the more strongly the
fact and the concept will be associated in the semantic network, and
(c) inferring facts that are not stored in a semantic network will take a
relatively long time. Therefore, we can decrease the amount of time it
takes to retrieve information if we increase our exposure to that or
related information.
Can we re-write the semantic web to bring names closer to the
higher order categories? Conclusions drawn from the studies of Collins,
Quilian and Conrad suggest some thinking skills with which we can. Rewriting our semantic web seems to depend on the frequency of our
experiences. Therefore, if I want to up-date my semantic web by
adding a new persons name to it, then I will have to do so by adding it
in more ways than one with a high level of frequency. This may involve
strategies similar with that of verbal shadowing, but can also expand to
strategies that involve thinking about the person and their name after
meeting them in ways that would more firmly affix their identity to my
previously established semantic networks. I might go home and look-

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up her up on Facebook. I might consider all the ways that I am or might

be connected with her through everyone else that I knew at the
Potluck. I might try connecting her to my semantic network in other
ways by talking with her more at the Potluck to figure out what
knowledge or experiences we have in common. I might even use some
assistive technology and program my phone calendar to alert me with
her name every day for a couple of days after meeting her. I admit I
have the most faith in this last skill, although it is less of a thinking skill
and more of a mind hack as is uses assistive technology to, in a way,
program the brain to transfer information from short-term to long-term
memory.
While these thinking skills demand a reconsideration of how we
think and make connections during conversations and encounters with
new acquaintances, they all, in one way or another, fall under the
category of a mind hack. They are ways to almost trick the mind into
retaining information it wouldnt otherwise have been able to. To
previous thinking skills social language and semantic webs lead
nicely to this next slightly more authentic thinking skill, which relies
less on the generation of vocabulary or language, and more on the
depth (i.e. multiple levels) of meanings within our interactions with
people.
We are more likely to put newly learned information into our
long-term memory if there is a story attached to the information
(Kintsch, 1998). To do this, the story must allow us to (a) establish the
word in a semantic network of meaning (as previously discussed) and
(b) establish the words meaning within levels of representation.
Kintsch argued that a text is represented at multiple levels. In a single
phrase there is the (a) surface level that represents the exact words in
the sentence, there is (b) the propositional level that represents the
meaning of the words in the phrase, and there is (c) a situation model
that is comprised of the major points in the story. For example, in the
phrase Kate decided not to go to the party and turned back to what
she was reading. Kintsch might express the three levels of
representation in this phrase as:
(a) Surface Level: The exact wording Kate decided not to go to the
party and turned back to what she was reading.

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(b)Propositional Level: The conception of the sentence: Kate was

reading something. She didnt go to the party because she
decided she didnt want to go.
(c) Situation Model: The larger situation represented by the
sentence is that Kate probably preferred to read rather than go
to the party.
What Kintsch highlighted as interesting about these multiplve levels of
thinking is that we tend to forget the surface level (a) information
rather quickly. The closer the information is to a (c) situation model the
more likely it is to stay in our long-term memory. Kintsch, Welsch,
Schmalhofer, and Zinmny (1990) further explored this theory by
examining participants ability to remember these different levels of
information over periods of time ranging up to 4 days. Their results
showed that surface information is forgotten rather quickly, whereas
propositional information is more effectively retained, but situation
models are retained almost perfectly. Their work proved that people
might not remember the wording of what they read or what was
explicitly said in a conversation, but they will remember the general
ideas. Information coming in from the outside environment will be
forgotten if it is not attended to. People cannot keep information in the
short-term memory indefinitely because new information is always
coming in and pushing out old information from the limited short-termmemory.
Shepard and Teghtsoonian (1961) measured this very problem.
They gave participants a sequence of 200 three-digit numbers and
tasked them to identify when a number was repeated. They noticed
that the first few numbers were recalled with relative ease, but as an
increasing amount of numbers were added to the list, the participants
ability to accurately recall whether or not they had seen a number
before quickly dwindled. The results showed that recognition or
memory of repeated numbers declined rapidly after the first few
numbers. The rapid decrease testifies to the fact that these numbers
are being held in short term memory and have not yet made it into
long-term memory.
This does not bode well for people like me, who are seeking
strategies to help them remember the surface level information, like
names. But perhaps Kintsch doesnt leave our horizon looking as bleak
as we might think. His observation that we retain situation models
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more readily than surface level information suggests that if we are able
to identify the situation of the person we have just met, in other words,
if we are able to identify a story about them their story then we are
better equipped to remember them. Kintschs work suggests that I
must do more than just repeat her name over and over again (i.e.
verbal overshadowing), which addresses only surface level cognition,
and instead repetitiously consider her story (i.e. semantic networking).
Perhaps she is a librarian who hopes to find her roller skates when she
goes to visit her mother, and I decide to remember her as Sahira, the
roller skating librarian. It may sound ridiculous, but its a good start.
Im using a situation model that is highly memorable precisely because
it is ridiculous.
As if in response to the growing awareness of a need for situation
models to solidify the transfer from short-term to long-term memory,
Craik and Lockhart (1972) presented an argument that transferring
information from short-term into long-term memory was not an issue of
rehearsal or repetition, but a matter of how deeply the information was
processed. They called their theory, depth of processing, and argued
that repetitious practice only improves memory (i.e. long-term
memory) if the material is rehearsed in a deep and meaningful way; in
other words, if the participants can assign meaning to the information
of interest. Glenberg, Smith, and Green (1977) proved Craik and
Lockharts point by demonstrating that practice and rehearsal did not
successfully transfer information from short-term into long-term
memory. They had participants study a four-digit number for 2
seconds, rehearse a word for various periods of time (2, 6, or 18
seconds), then recall the four digits. Participants were led to assume
that they were just rehearsing the word to fill the time, but their
recollection of the words was actually being tested. Participants
recalled 7-13% of the assigned words, on average. These results
suggest that simple practice and repletion alone will not help me
remember this ladys name.
However, a complimentary study, one that supports Craik and
Lockharts theory of depth of processing, was done by Kapur et al.
(1994). The study examined the difference between brain correlates of
the deep and shallow processing of words. To measure shallow
processing, participants judged whether or not words contained
particular letters. Judging participants deep processing required that

14

participants identify whether or not the words described living things.

Both studies used the same amount of time, however participants
recalled 75% of the words they processed on a deep level and only
57% of the words they processes at a shallow level. This demonstrated
a greater amount of activation during deep processing, thus leading
me to the conclusion that this is an excellent thinking skill for transfer
of information into long-term memory. To do this myself I might try
thinking about the meaning behind the name I have just learned. For
example, the name Sahira has many morphemes of meaning that I
could pull out it to help myself remember. These meanings might help
me transfer the name into my long-term memory.
The final trick, or thinking skill, would be how I can ensure that I
actually know what I think I know. After employing every one the
thinking skills described above, how can I be certain that I have
genuinely retained the information I seek to acquire? Current research
suggests that we will only know if we have truly retained information
when we have taught another person or something like a person.
Schwartz et al. used teachable agents i.e. computer simulations of
learning partners or students in need of education in a particular area
of study to demonstrate that when students are given information to
teach, they learn the information on a deeper level than they would if
simply studying the material on their own.
In Schwartzs study, students interacted with the teachable
agents by showing the agents how concepts were related to each
other. To teach concepts, students linked concepts to each other using
a virtual graphic organizer that helped them define and describe
relationships. Formative and summative assessments showed a
noticeable increase in student (i.e. human student) mastery of the
content after working with the teachable agents. Ironically, teaching
for the benefit of another helps solidify the information in our own
mind, thus benefiting ourselves. Chin, Dohmen, and Schwartz (2013)
performed a similar, but more complicated study, which required
students to work with more concepts and more connectors (i.e. more
links and nodes). They postulated that the more of these connections
the student could teach, they more visible their thinking would be.
Their results demonstrated not only a noticeably greater mastery of
the content when working with the teachable agents than without, but
they also found that teachable agents offered the students other

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cognitive benefits as well. The recursive feedback that the teachable

agents provided encouraged students to think more independently
about the content they were endeavoring to convey and learn. Rather
than depending on the final Yes or No of an authoritative teacher,
students could rely on the recursive feedback to better understand
their errors, misunderstandings, and metacognition.
Perhaps, after applying all of these thinking skills to help myself
remember her name, the best strategy I can employ to help myself is
to introduce her to someone else, in other words, to teach her to
another person. Doing this would activate many of the other thinking
skills that I might have previously endeavored to activate: verbal
overshadowing, avoiding assumptions, building a social vocabulary
with her, as well as referring to my semantic networks, referencing
situation models in order to reach depth of processing. While many of
these strategies applied alone are unlikely to be entirely successful, if
applied together, I might have a shot at getting a second chance to
talk to her when I see her again.
Unfortunately, every one of these thinking skills would fail in one
way or another to help me remember a name that I have already
confused or forgotten. They offer strategies for remembering a new
persons name more efficiently and some even might help me wriggle
my way out of that state of ambiguity not knowing whether I know
her or not but none of them truly help me fill the gaps in my
knowledge. Perhaps I cant fill these gaps in my memory, but hopefully
with these thinking skills I can at least be more mindful of them.

References
Anderson, John R. Cognitive Psychology and Its Implications. Carnegie
Mellon University: Worth Publishers. 2010

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