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Broadly speaking, as represented in figure 3.2, memory relates to the processes occurring within the ‘black box’, whereas learning relates to changes occurring within the ‘black box’ which can bring about a changed response. This distinction is useful, because it allows psychologists to explore the ways in which learning can be influenced by different cognitive variables and individual differences. For our purposes, it allows us to think about how you can improve your own learning by processing information in different ways.

Attention, perception, memory, problem-- solving

Stimulus

Black Box

Response

Input

Output

Thinking

Learning

Figure 3.2: What happens in the “black box” of the human mind? Cognitive psychologists try to find out more about the thinking processes involved in learning, which mediate our response (behaviour) to a stimulus. These include processes such as attention, perception, memory, and problem-solving. Levels of processing Memory has been extensively studied by psychologists since the 1970s. For example, Fergus Craik, Endel Tulving and Robert Lockhart became famous for their pioneering research investigating what helps us to remember. They conducted a series of experiments (Craik & Lockhart, 1972; Craik & Tulving, 1975) looking at what they called the ‘levels of processing’ model of memory. They proposed that people remember things best when they have deeply processed information, compared to superficial processing. In their research, they asked participants to study a list of words, and to answer yes/no questions about each word they saw. Some participants were asked to look at the textual features of the words (e.g. “Is the word in capital letters?”), some were asked to think about the sound of the word (e.g. “Does the word rhyme with TRAIN?”), and some were asked to think about the meaning of the word (e.g. “Is the word an animal name?”). They called these types of task graphemic (textual features), phonemic (sounds) and semantic (meaning), and proposed that the tasks would require different types of cognitive processing, which would different affect how many words were accurately recalled. They suggested that graphemic tasks were relatively shallow, semantic tasks involved deep processing, and phonemic tasks were intermediate, and that deeper

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