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3.2 What is cognition? 81

File Folder
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File Pol&

Attached are the 6les I menboned in the meehng.
Have a good weekendl

- HWi

Figure 3.5(b) A Windows-based interface, with menus, icons, and buttons.

What strategies do you use to help you remember things?

Comment People often write down what they need to remember on a piece of paper. They also ask
others to remind them. Another approach is to use various mental strategies, like mnemon-
ics. A mnemonic involves taking the first letters of a set of words in a phrase or set of con-
cepts and using them to make a more memorable phrase, often using bizarre and
idiosyncratic connections. For example, some people have problems working out where east
is in relation to west and vice versa (i.e., is it to the left or right). A mnemonic to help figure
this out is to take the first letters of the four main points of the compass and then use them in
the phrase "Never Eat Shredded Wheat" mentally recited in a clockwise sequence.

A growing problem for computer users is file management. The number of
documents created, images and videoclips downloaded, emails and attachments
saved, URLs bookmarked, and so on increases every day. A major problem is find-
ing them again. Naming is the most common means of encoding them, but trying to
remember a name of a file you created some time back can be very difficult, espe-
cially if there are tens of thousands of named files. How might such a process be fa-
cilitated, bearing in mind people's memory abilities? Mark Lansdale, a British
psychologist, has been researching this problem of information retrieval for many