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