Knowledge is power. That phrase has always resonated soundly within me, and even remained pertinent to subjects I didn’t enjoy; I have never been a fan of psychology, perhaps due to the feelings of scrutiny I undergo when in classes whose goal is to delve into the human mind (my own brain is a private matter, personally), but I still hold an appreciation for any chance to expand my knowledge. I’ve held this opinion towards information for as long as I can remember, as for some reason learning has always come naturally for me, along with a natural desire to read and reflect, explore and study- the memorization of a plethora of paleontological taxon quite effortless in concurrence with my interest in extinct creatures. It is for these reasons
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Observational learning is, of course, one of the prime factors in development, both at a young age and throughout life (Huffman, 2012). In more recent defense of this, I can recall my high-school shop classes, where I gave my attention to my teacher, and through attentive focus retained the information he demonstrated; usually I was then able to reproduce what I had observed- techniques for a proper weld, or how to apply and sand glazing putty, among many other industrial processes- in a manner that was consistent with the original. Because I didn’t allow anything to distract me during those steps, I consistently produced a good-quality finished product, and was given the positive reinforcement from my teacher of a higher grade than those who, as my teacher was wont to say, “dinked around” in class. Those four factors to observational learning, attention, retention, reproduction, and reinforcement, illustrate that we don’t automatically learn every process we see- for our brains to permanently store knowledge long-term we must experience each consecutive element (Huffman, …show more content…
Properly retained memories, needless to say, are held within our long-term memory storage- henceforth referred to as “LTM”- which differs from the other two categories of memory, the sensory and short-term (STM) variants (Huffman, 2012). We are naturally always sensing things- words on a billboard, an advertising jingle on the radio- and this information is held within sensory memory storage for but a few quick moments, enough time for our brains to process it, and either transfer it to LTM, or move on (at which point the memory is “discarded”); upon arrival in STM storage, the information will still only be retrievable for a few seconds- around thirty- extendable either by maintenance rehearsal- the practice of repeating the information over and over to ensure it remains “fresh”, or (most permanently) if it’s transferred to LTM storage. The most effective way to reach this category is through elaborative rehearsal (Huffman, 2012), something that I employ daily; for instance, during a neurology unit in an anatomy class, I was required to memorize the twelve cranial nerves (for simplicity’s sake I won’t recount them all here), and while it would have been impractical for me to have repeated them continuously up until the
Observational learning is, of course, one of the prime factors in development, both at a young age and throughout life (Huffman, 2012). In more recent defense of this, I can recall my high-school shop classes, where I gave my attention to my teacher, and through attentive focus retained the information he demonstrated; usually I was then able to reproduce what I had observed- techniques for a proper weld, or how to apply and sand glazing putty, among many other industrial processes- in a manner that was consistent with the original. Because I didn’t allow anything to distract me during those steps, I consistently produced a good-quality finished product, and was given the positive reinforcement from my teacher of a higher grade than those who, as my teacher was wont to say, “dinked around” in class. Those four factors to observational learning, attention, retention, reproduction, and reinforcement, illustrate that we don’t automatically learn every process we see- for our brains to permanently store knowledge long-term we must experience each consecutive element (Huffman, …show more content…
Properly retained memories, needless to say, are held within our long-term memory storage- henceforth referred to as “LTM”- which differs from the other two categories of memory, the sensory and short-term (STM) variants (Huffman, 2012). We are naturally always sensing things- words on a billboard, an advertising jingle on the radio- and this information is held within sensory memory storage for but a few quick moments, enough time for our brains to process it, and either transfer it to LTM, or move on (at which point the memory is “discarded”); upon arrival in STM storage, the information will still only be retrievable for a few seconds- around thirty- extendable either by maintenance rehearsal- the practice of repeating the information over and over to ensure it remains “fresh”, or (most permanently) if it’s transferred to LTM storage. The most effective way to reach this category is through elaborative rehearsal (Huffman, 2012), something that I employ daily; for instance, during a neurology unit in an anatomy class, I was required to memorize the twelve cranial nerves (for simplicity’s sake I won’t recount them all here), and while it would have been impractical for me to have repeated them continuously up until the