- Mar 2022
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A familiar example ofsuch offloading is the way young children count on their fingers when workingout a math problem. Their fingers “hold” an intermediate sum so that their mindsare free to think about the mathematical operation they must execute (addition,subtraction) to reach the final answer.
Children counting on their fingers is an example of offloading cognitive load by using proprioception.
Different cultures use different finger sequences (particularly for the number 3) for counting up.
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Back then, Macedonia foundherself increasingly frustrated with the conventional format of foreign-languagecourses: a lot of sitting, listening, and writing. That’s not how anyone learnstheir native language, she notes. Young children encounter new words in a richsensorimotor context: as they hear the word “apple,” they see and touch theshiny red fruit; they may even bring it to their mouth, tasting its sweet flesh andsmelling its crisp scent. All of these many hooks for memory are missing fromthe second-language classroom.
Most foreign language leaners spend all their time in classrooms or at home sitting down, listening, reading, and writing. This is antithetical to how children acquire language in more natural settings where they're able to move around, interact, taste, touch, smell, etc. as they learn new words in their language. These additional sensory mnemonic techniques add an incredible amount of information and associative hooks to help them remember new words and grammatical structures.
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proprioceptive cue may be the mostpowerful of the three: research shows that making gestures enhances our abilityto think even when our gesturing hands are hidden from our view.
Annie Murphy Paul indicates that proprioceptive associations may be more powerful than auditory or visual ones as she notes that "research shows that making gestures enhances our ability to think even when our gesturing hands are hidden from our view."
This is something that could be researched and analyzed.
My personal experience is that visual >> auditory >> smell >> proprioception. Smell with respect to memory is incredibly difficult to exercise as are auditory method. Visual and proprioceptive methods are easier to actively practice though.
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There isthe auditory hook: we hear ourselves saying the words aloud. There is the visualhook: we see ourselves making the relevant gesture. And there is the“proprioceptive” hook; this comes from feeling our hands make the gesture
Gestural mnemonic associations work on three levels: auditory associations, visual associations, and proprioceptive associations.
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