Foreign Perspectives

It was the turn of memory today with three distinct modules followed by a session on ethics and the project briefing before an optional lecture.

The first module looked at different strategies for learning word pairs (forming a sentence containing both words is the way to go as it engages deeper processing which in turn helps encoding and recall). We analysed our results using ANOVA in SPSS.

Next up was a consideration of a variation of Bartlett’s demonstration of the usefulness of schemas in recalling meaningful material and events. Even just omitting a title from a text can make it much more difficult to recall. This session finished with a brief look at autobiographical memory which looks like it would be quite difficult to study.

Finally, we looked at Edwards and Middleton’s approach to looking at collective memory which felt like a complicated way of describing the obvious i.e. If a couple if people get together to describe a film then they’ll remember more than either would individually.

The obligatory session on ethics was much more engaging than I had expected to be and the time flew in.

With our preparatory sessions over it was into the project briefing. That ran through the eight basic areas in which we can choose to do our project i.e. one for each broad topic covered over Sunday and Monday. It seems to have served to confuse most people in terms of what they might do but it’ll sort itself out in the morning.

The optional lecture was on the use of psychology in lion conservation projects in Africa and was thoroughly engaging.

Thanks to massively reduced numbers on the final residentials compared to a few years ago, the students union don’t organise their customary social events so there are some unofficial ones in their place, tonight being karoke night.