Activity 5.2

During this week’s readings about memory, I was able to make connections from James perspective to the constructivist information processing perspective and to the article, The Critical Role of the Retrieval Process in Long Term Retention. James and the constructivist’s information processing perspective both support the idea that the mind needs a “cue” to retrieve information. Specifically, James states, “the cue determines its vast set of potentialities toward a particular point. And if you now look to see how this happens you immediately perceive that the cue is something contiguously associated with the thing recalled.” (p. 59)

I really enjoyed James description of the brain, “each of the associates is a hood to which it hangs, a means to fish it up when sunk below the surface. Together they form a network of attachments by which it is woven into the entire tissue of our thought.” (p. 61) James’s last statement is aligned with the constructivist’s information processing point of view, which also identifies memory as a network which makes associations with information.

Finally, I noticed a connection between James and the article, The Critical Role of the Retrieval Process in Long Term Retention. James describes the retrieval process and associations, “but if we remember because of our associations, and if these are due to our organized brain paths, we easily see how the law of recency and repetition should prevail. Paths frequently and recently ploughed are those that lie most open, those which may be expected most easily to lead to results.” (p. 59) Similarly, the article describes the retrieval process, “the idea is that retrieval of information from memory leads to elaboration of the memory trace and/or the creation of additional retrieval routes, which makes it most likely that the information will be successfully retrieved again in the future.” (p. 24) These statements both explain that as information is constantly retrieved the paths become “plowed” and memory retrieval becomes smoother.

As a student, I can personally relate to making associations and retrieving information in order to understand the content that I’m currently studying. For example, I’m currently taking a sociolinguistics course and I’m required to retrieve the morphology, syntax, semantic and phonetic content that I learned in linguistics. In addition, I’m required to make new associations to sociology and connect ideas with my prior knowledge about society and language. The more I learn and retrieve my prior experiences, the more the paths are “plowed” and information becomes readily available. Given the right “cues”, I make connections, associations, retrieve and build deeper networks of memory.