Playing Games With Memory Record

Playing Games With Memory

Record your score on the first object memory

Record your score on the second object memory

Note observations about your strategy on the second memory task:

I tried to think of a story and I guess it helped, but I got a lower score than the first test where I didn't make up a story. Perhaps I didn't take a long enough time coming up with it. I also got caught up on details while remembering it. Was it a mouse in a hand? Or was the mouse in the trap? I got confused. Certain elements came to mind very quickly -- for example, I had a clown sitting on the elephant combing a few strands of hair on top of its head. I had the bear waiting in line for his hair to be combed by the clown. Then I had the elephant see the mouse and jump up on the chair.

What type of story or set of connections did you devise? Did it help improve your memory?

It helped improve aspects of my memory, but I couldn't think of a story involving all of the elements, so I just tried to remember those things randomly.

Record your score on the third memory task (the house)

How well did this trick work? I tried to think of places to set my objects that were unlikely, as it said in the directions. For example, with the airplane, I imagined it sitting on the toilet seat. The pumpkin I imagined floating in the bathtub. The duck I set on the bed and I put the wrench in its mouth (that seemed impossible, but imagining it was funny, so I knew that I wouldn't forget it). The corn on the cob I imagined balancing on top of my computer monitor. The trumpet I put also put on the bed.

The reason I put the duck and the wrench and the trumpet all on the bed (the wrench in the duck's mouth) was because I devised a story in which the duck was playing the trumpet, but then it broke so the duck needed to fix it with the wrench.

Ebbinghaus defined memory as "the faculty of the mind to bring back past experiences into consciousness" (Haberlandt 1998). These games were interesting in that the techniques that they offered one to use really did help bring back the past experience of seeing objects. These games show that the brain needs to make logical sense of elements if one is going to store them in their memory for any period of time. It was amazing that in the first test I really paid attention to all of the elements, but the minute the screen was gone, there were only four or so that came straight to my mind. The other ones I really had to think about. I always thought I had a pretty good memory, but it seems that in order to maintain a list of things, there needs to be some kind of way of keeping the things one wants to remember alive, so to speak.

Coming up with the stories was a good way to remember a good portion of the objects. However, I had a hard time coming up with a story that incorporated all of them. I've never created a story to remember things before this. I also find it interesting that when I moved on to the second test, I immediately forgot things from the first test. It was only after looking down at my paper and I saw what I wrote that I remembered those objects.