User:Mcontris/Chunking (psychology)

Drafts for assignment.

In cognitive psychology, chunking is a process by which individual pieces of an information set are broken down and then grouped together in a meaningful whole. The chunks by which the information is grouped is meant to improve short-term retention of the material, thus bypassing the limited capacity of working memory  and allowing the working memory to be more efficient . A chunk is a collection of basic familiar units that have been grouped together and stored in a person's memory. These chunks are able to be retrieved more easily due to their coherent familiarity.

The phenomenon of chunking as a memory mechanism is easily observed in the way individuals group numbers, and information, in the day-to-day life. For example, when recalling a number such as 12101946, if numbers are grouped as 12, 10 and 1946, a mnemonic is created for this number as a day, month and year. It would be stored as December 12, 1946 instead of a string of numbers. Similarly, another illustration of the limited capacity of working memory as suggested by George Miller can be seen from the following example: While recalling a mobile phone number such as 9849523450, we might break this into 98 495 234 50. Thus, instead of remembering 10 separate digits that is beyond the "seven plus-or-minus two" memory span, we are remembering four groups of numbers. ''' Remembering an entire chunk can also occur if one has stored the beginnings of a chunk in their working memory. This results in the long-term memory recovering the remainder of the chunk. '''

Various kinds of memory training systems and mnemonics include training and drill in specially-designed recoding or chunking schemes. Such systems existed before Miller's paper, but there was no convenient term to describe the general strategy or substantive and reliable research. The term "chunking" is now often used in reference to these systems. As an illustration, patients with Alzheimer's disease typically experience working memory deficits; chunking is an effective method to improve patients' verbal working memory performance. ''' Chunking has been proven to decrease the load on the working memory in multiple ways. As well as remembering chunked information easier, a person can also recall other non-chunked memories easier due to the benefits that chunking has on the working memory. '''

 Chunking In Seven-Month-Old Infants 

''' Previous research shows that the mechanism of chunking Is available in seven-month-old infants. This means, that chunking can occur even before the working memory capacity has completely developed. Knowing that the working memory has very limited capacity, it can be beneficial to utilize chunking. In infants, where their working memory capacity is not completely developed, it can be even more beneficial to chunk memories. These studies were done using the violation-of-expectation method and recording the amount of time the infants watched the objects in front of them. Although the experiment showed that infants can use chunking, researchers also concluded that an infant's ability to chunk memories will still have maturing to do over the next year of their lives.  Hello. There is some great information here. One suggestion I have is to pull from some more sources. This way the article does not seem biased toward one kind of research. Also, there is mention in the article that chunking can be used to learn many things outside of verbal learning. What are some things chunking could be used for? So far, it looks like you have some solid contributions. Great job! (Spencer)'''