3 It's the thought that counts

3.1 Organisation and improved recall

This section will concentrate on thinking and specifically how we organise our thoughts, how we make sense of our world and how we remember (or sometimes forget) what is relevant.

Psychologists who study thinking are working in the area of cognitive psychology. Cognition means knowledge so cognitive psychologists are interested in what knowledge people have, how they have acquired this knowledge and how they use this knowledge. This means that the areas they study include attention, perception, memory, problem solving and language.

Organising our thoughts involves:

• using mental images

• forming concepts (putting information into categories)

• developing schemas (constructing mental packages of related information).

We will now look at these three types of organisation in more detail.