KNOWLEDGE ACQUISITION AND MEMORY DEVELOPMENT

 

KNOWLEDGE ACQUISITION AND MEMORY DEVELOPMENT

Introduction

Development of the brain in human beings starts from the fetus period to that time when the child is brought to the world. The brain part is the most essential human organ that enhances the relationship with other humans, animals, and even machines. The human brain plays a significant role in sensing pathways and environmental influences where past experiences have a huge influence on shaping our brains. As we grow from infancy onwards, our brains continue integrating every information we see or hear. Therefore, it’s essential for parents to be involved in developmental activities with their infants. For instance, parents can actively take part in communicating with their children, games, introducing children to new adventures, and be supportive. It’s in the brain where new concepts, information, ideas, and knowledge are developed. To have active brain development, care should be taken during early child development stages as adulthood brain depends on early development.

What is memory development, and how does it relate to acquiring new knowledge?

Memory development is the increase in knowledge as a child grows from infancy to adulthood. Studies show that memory development in children becomes evident at 3 years as they start showing considerable advancement in declarative memory. Progressive growth in memory continues throughout adolescence, majorly characterized by the development of short-term memory, working memory, long-term memory as well as the autobiographical memory. According to Jean Piaget School of thoughts, children do not generally know less as compared to adults, but they do think differently (Andreu & Sieber, 2019). .

According to Piaget, cognitive development in children have four stages, sensorimotor stage, preoperational stage, concrete operational, and formal operational period. In the first stage (Sensory), the child starts to learn new things by use of sensory organs like touching, which occurs between birth and 2-3 years. It is during this stage that children learn new knowledge related to the world. The second stage (pre operational stage) occurs between 2-7 years, where children start to put their learned knowledge into practice through a symbolical representation of objects by use of pictures and words.

The third stage (Concrete Operation) takes place between 7-11 years. At this stage, the memory has become more concrete, meaning that the child can think and reason more logically and as well organize his/her thoughts. The fourth and final stage is the formal operational stage that occurs from 12 years of age and above. At this stage, the children have become adolescents where they are able to complete their sense of reasoning, organize their thoughts and reasoning logically, solve problems, plan for the future, and provide solutions in hypothetical situations leading to schemas. Schemas represent both physical and mental actions essential in helping an individual to understand new things, which are essential in acquiring new knowledge as purported by cognitivist theory. According to Barlett and Piaget, schemata influence the individual acquisition of knowledge, which is an essential aspect in developing a young brain due to the existence of space for change (Rosser-Majors, 2017, 2.3 Schema Development, para. 4). This helps children to make a difference in the sounds they perceive from humans, music, or animals. In general, brain development in children depends on the response they receive from their caregivers or parents during their interaction.

 

 

 

Why is it important to successfully move information from working (short-term) memory to long-term memory (effective information processing)?

Processing of new information involves various stages requiring information to be transferred from short-term memory to long-term memory. An example of short-term memory is working memory. Working memory is essential as it initiates individual attentiveness as it controls distractions by figuring out our overall learning objectives, which is the basis of long-term memory (Rosser-Majors, 2017, 3.1 Working Memory, para. 1). For working memory, simple arithmetic is an excellent example of short-memory like remembering our phone numbers, price of groceries, and License number. The sensory memory stage represents processes all information that has been acquired on a daily basis and stores it for a few seconds. This information can be lost if an individual does not pay attention to it. However, if an individual pays attention to it, it’s transferred from sensory memory to short-term memory where it is held for about one minute (Howe et al., 2016). For information that is stored for a long period, it is stored in the long-term memory for days, weeks, years, or forever. Long-term memory has the most significant memory capacity compared to other sensory and short-term memory. Ideally, long-term memory keeps facts and various life episodes, including happy, tragic, and sad moments.

What strategies can be utilized to move knowledge from working memory to long-term memory more effectively? (List a minimum of three strategies.)

Long-term memory is a large cognitive system that has the potential to store a large amount of information permanently. According to the Baddeley model, Long-term memory comprises essential subcomponents, which include visual-spatial scratchpad, phonological loop, and episodic buffer (Rosser-Majors, 2017, 3.1 Working Memory, para. 2). Repeated representation of information in many ways, as well as active retrieval, represent essential concepts related to long-term memory. The way the teacher offers their lesson determines how long-term memory is to build past knowledge rather than a limited capacity. To understand this, I interviewed a teacher who is a close friend of mine who opened up to me her experience in developing long-term memory and working memory (Howe et al., 2016). Daniela confessed that giving new assignments was more of limited capacity memory that represented working memory instead of a concrete learning experience. Therefore, she focused on developing a more detailed lesson plan to enhance building a long-term memory through repetition, representation of information in different ways, and actively retrieving information that relates to the organizational schemata, which puts information in long-term memory.

How much do attention and perception play a role in the successful development of schema?

Perception and attention collaboratively lead to the successful development of schema. For instance, perception involves sensing the surroundings while attention is concerned with the stimuli. As mentioned earlier, the schema is the manner in which information is categorized and organized. Attention refers to noticing and being aware of the surrounding and dismissing the vague information. Certain situations affect the manner in which people pay attention to certain information. For instance, when one is presented with a number of information, he/she will focus on the important information only to receive the most accurate information. We control our self-efficacy according to the type of information we perceive (Rosser-Majors, 2017, 3.2 Attention and Perception, para. 2). On the other hand, the way we comprehend, discern, or interpret information is referred to as perception. This is possible through encoding, retrieval, and consolidation, which are essential concepts in planning our future behaviors.

 

 

 

How do the types of memories (knowledge) affect how we effectively process information?

There exist two types of memories that are derived from different sources. One of these sources is semantic memories that are derived from perceived concepts and facts. Sematic memory is derived from factual contents like books and journals. The other type of memory is episodic memory that is derived from personal experiences in life. It is also related to events like autobiographical memories that have specific dates and times. These two memory sources affect the manner in which we effectively process information as memory is used to store, encode, retrieve, and make use of different types of information. Therefore, the memory will examine both individual and item performances each at a specific time. People are defined by their past experiences, which contribute to the making of own individual self (Rosser-Majors, 2017, 3.4 Autobiographical Memories, para. 11). I personally believe that the correlation of both episodic and semantic memory will help an individual develop appropriate information; since not everyone can be able to adapt to a certain set of rules but instead, one can learn the positive and negative things in life through living individualized life. However, false information can create false memories, which is a resemblance of semantic errors.

How does false memory development affect how we learn effectively? Is anyone immune?

We create false memories through collecting misinformed information or wrong interpretation of information. Still, false memory can be developed through hearing a false story that never existed. Other aspects of false memory the interference of new memory by existing memory (Andreu & Sieber, 2019). For instance, false memory commonly happens in the identification of suspects or placing keys in a certain place leading to falsified memory as we think that happened, but in an actual sense didn’t happen. No one can escape false memory as we all have short and long-term memory that is retrievable at any time. Most of the psychological studies focus on false memory as it has huge impact on individual’s life and is particular at courtroom testimony, terrorism, psychotherapy, and treatment of emergences (Rosser-Majors, 2017, 3.5 False Memory, para. 11). False memory represents all people’s statements that they aren’t aware of or make-up events that one did not attend.

Conclusion

From this discussion, what we learn from infancy to adulthood impacts our future behavior. Parents have a crucial role in developing appropriate information for their young kids to enhance the development of a healthy brain. For instance, the behaviors of school teenagers depict of being drug addicts or successful in class is determined by the kind of information or experiences they were exposed to when they were young. Therefore, engaging a child in rightful activities when young, plays a crucial role in developing straight concepts, ideas, and knowledge that are important in shaping his/her adulthood life.

 

 

 

 

 

 

References

Rosser-Majors, M. L. (2017). Theories of learning: An exploration. Retrieved from https://content.ashford.eduhttp://thepeakperformancecenter.com/educational-learning/learning/memory/stages-of-memory/

Andreu, R., & Sieber, S. (2019). Knowledge integration across organizations: how different types of knowledge suggest different ‘integration trajectories.’ Knowledge and Process Management, 12(3), 153–160. https://doi.org/10.1002/kpm.232

‌ Howe, M. L., Candel, I., Otgaar, H., Malone, C., & Wimmer, M. C. (2016). Valence and the development of immediate and long-term false memory illusions. Memory, 18(1), 58–75. https://doi.org/10.1080/09658210903476514

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