A child learning to tie its own shoe, is
familiar with the texture, smell of what a shoe is like. For years, their shoe
has been tied for them and they have seen other people tie it. When the child
learns in class to make two loops and knot them together, it will stay in their
head for about two seconds and leave which is a loss in the sensory memory. The
child begins to practice tying the
shoe, making two bunny ears and knotting them together, every single time the
shoe comes untied, this becomes part of their working memory that is taking
much attention and pattern recognization from rehersing the bunny song the
teacher taught. When the teacher blew her whistle for reccess to be over, the
student tried tying their untied shoes in a panick, and failed, which is due to
an encoding failure. After practicing many more times, the student encodes the
information to it’s long term memory and retrieve the process of how to tie
their shoe whenever they need it tied.
How does something in the working memory begin to encode and then move to the long term memory? Is this like riding a bike, or is that muscle memory? I think this is a good example of how a child goes about learning things, and storing them in their memories for future use. However, how does the child retrieve the memory of learning to tie his/her shoes? I think seeing a pair of shoes, then remembering the song occurs, which allows the child to remember the motions.
ReplyDeleteI think you have a little confusion here. Once the child has started practicing (once something enters their conscious thought) it's already in working memory. The sensory information is the smell and things you described, along with lots of other information they never consciously process (the temperature, the people around them, etc).
ReplyDeleteAnything in conscious thought is working memory, so yes, rehearsing a song would count (but rehearsal does not move things to long term memory--be able to know why) or just thinking about what they're doing. How does it move to long term memory? You have here it's from 'practice', but just repeating the skill WON'T move it to long term memory (this is important!). Look over some method of encoding and think about why they work....
I like your example of forgetting, but how did they fail to encode? (Was it because they only used repetition and not a true method of encoding?) :)
There are also many reasons why people might forget things--not just this one.