by The Open University
Available in 36 free installments
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We use concepts so automatically that we are rarely aware that we are using them. Perhaps it is easier to see this process in action when we observe children developing their thinking as they struggle to develop concepts. Children often make mistakes by overgeneralising a concept that they are trying to get to grips with. They may have developed a concept for a dog as an animal with hair, four legs and a tail, but then they may also apply this label to a cat or a sheep or even a horse. Similarly they may learn that the tall person with the deep voice is called Daddy and then may embarrassingly identify any passing man as Daddy.
It may also become evident how much we use concepts when we look at a few memory experiments. Try the first experiment for yourself in the activity below.
Read once through the list of words below trying to remember them and then scroll the screen until the list disappears but you can still see the 'Now read the disucssion' link. Once you have written down as many words as you can remember click to read the discussion.
Bed
Peach
Hat
Armchair
Daffodil
Shirt
Rose
Lemon
Sock
Daisy
Strawberry
Table
Buttercup
Apple
Sideboard
Trousers
Now that you have written all the words down that you can recall, I would like you to see if you can remember any more words with the help of some cues. The list contains items belonging to the following categories; furniture, fruit, clothing and flowers. Have the cues helped you remember any more words?
Have a look at your first try at recalling the words. Did you realise that the words belonged to categories and did you recall them in category clusters?
If possible you could try this out on some other people and compare their results with yours.
This experiment is a simplified version of an experiment by Weston Bousfield (1953). Bousfield asked participants to learn a list of 60 words that could be divided into four categories. Though the words were presented in a random order, the participants tended to remember them in groups which belonged to the same category, so if they remembered apple, then they would remember peach, lemon and strawberry.
In our version of the experiment you were also asked to have a second go at recalling the words after you had been given the category headings. Most participants in these types of experiments find that although they think they have recalled all the words they will be able to remember, they can actually access more words once they have been given category headings as cues.
This illustrates that this information must have been available but without the cue they could not access it. When we try to recall information that has been organised it seems each bit of the information cues the next bit because we have it stored in an organised rather than haphazard fashion.
