Reflection Paper On Cognitive Psychology

This past semester I have been taking a cognitive psychology class with Dr. Dietrich. Throughout the class we talked a lot about memory and how to improve memory. I took the knowledge that I learned in the class and helped Josh improve his study skills. Although I am not a professional and my ways of improving memory have not been guaranteed to work, I have strong background and reasoning to why it should benefit Josh. This paper will discuss some of the things that I suggested to help Josh and his memory techniques. I hope that you may also learn from this paper and have more insight into memory and how it works.
Josh has just started middle school and was very reluctant for me to help him with his studying. A little background on Josh is …show more content…
I asked him to grab some homework and pretend he was going to go study. Josh set up in the living room of his home. He turned the television on to a cattle auction and grabbed a snack. Josh and I then started to talk about attention. The human brain can only do so many things at one time. As much as everyone wants to believe that we can multitask there is a lot of evidence that points to it not being possible.
At first Josh did not believe me. He explained many situations where he had seen people multitasking. His example was “I bale hay and eat a sandwich. That is multitasking.” I asked him to think about the rows of hay where he had been eating and the ones where he had not. I also asked him to think about the speed of the tractor. I asked him if he drove slower when he was eating and if there was more hay left on the field where he had been eating? He agreed that he had to slow down and in some cases had to go back and get the rest of the hay he missed. Although he was doing two things at once, he could have ate first and then finished the hay and it would have been faster. I could see a light bulb go on in his head. Because of bottom-up-processing it is hard to study while doing something else. Bottom-up-processing refers to how our brain analysis and recognizes