semantic memory – Cognition in Class

November 28, 2021March 12, 2024

The Psychological Version of a Web Diagram

By Kelton O’Grady

“School.”

Your brain has just been primed. Before you even finished reading the word above, you had many things popping into your head. Mental images such as a building, teachers, homework, or even a classroom. (1). The effects on priming are predicted only when assuming that the typical time of activation-spread is in the order of hundreds of milliseconds. Let’s take a second and reflect on how your mind created these images, maybe a web diagram, (like you were taught at a young age to use for essays) connecting all similar ideas once you saw the word. This is one idea I wish I would have used more often my freshman year of college to better understand a wider variety of information and how they connect to many other things in life in different ways.

December 2, 2017

Cuing You in on How to Study Effectively

Picture this: you’re a first year college student, fresh out of high school. All throughout high school you got by, by barely studying and maybe just glancing over your notes before an exam. You always got a decently good grade all thanks to your minimal effort. Your teachers warned you college would be significantly harder but hey, what do they know, right? You get to college and take your first quiz or exam, following the same study habits from high school and what do you know, your grade did not come back very pretty.

No college student is immune to the stress and panic of studying for quizzes and exams, and your old high school study techniques are definitely not going to cut it in this new higher level learning environment. Just skimming your notes and praying something will stick will get you nowhere and ultimately just help you do poorly instead of helping you get the grades you need. What you need is a whole new way of studying, suited for your new college self, to help you succeed academically and make college a whole lot better in general.

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April 21, 2017

Memory Errors and You: Navigating College with a (Sometimes) Deceptive Mind

By Trevor Foster and Emily Wilson

So, you’re an incoming college freshman; if you are like most people your age, you will be entering into a completely new environment – both socially and academically. In such periods of drastic change, you might notice yourself beginning to not do as well in school as you’ve grown accustomed to, or you might find yourself forgetting things more often with this newfound freedom. Some of these changes might be due to errors in memory. A 1988 study by W. Scott Terry found that among the most commonly forgotten things are forgetting to deviate from your habits and forgetting to do some future task (1). However, memory errors cover much more than simply forgetting! This blog post will introduce some of the most common types of memory errors, and it will offer some possible tips on avoiding them.

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