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Categorization

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Recently I stumbled across a small-owned business created by a local mother. She has a handmade clothing line for kids 0 month to 5 years all of which she makes, ships, and takes inventory and stock for by herself. She oversees everything including her finances. She is also a stay-at-home mom while running this business at the same time.

Organization is an essential part in any business, but especially in a one-person operation. To obtain organization we must rely on categorization. Categorization refers to the process of organizing things into groups (Goldstein, 2015). For example, this mom has her clothing line separated into different types of clothing. She offers a variety of styles in shirts, dresses, pants, hats, and blankets. She offers tank tops, bell tops, cardigans, long sleeve hoodies. She makes peplum style dresses, tunic dresses, rompers, and t shirt dresses. For pants she makes diaper covers, shorts, leggings, harem pants, and straight leg. As for hats she offers headbands and beanies. Her blankets are only offered in ready to sell as all the clothing is custom fabric print. Customers select the print via photo albums along with price guides posted throughout the site.

As mentioned above, her price guides are also on her page. The items that contain more fabric and seem timelier to make are priced higher than those of small size and time dedication. Another example of categorization can be highlighted in reference to this. According to her page, a headband will cost $8, and a long sleeve hooded romper will be $28. I would expect this, as I would not expect it vice versa. The more fabric being used, the more money I will spend. The more time she dedicates to creating the item, the more money she must charge for labor. Therefore, the owner would not categorize the headband in the same price category as a full body clothing item. Likewise, it would be unreasonable to categorize these two together based on physical characteristics as well.

When looking at her page I could tell she took into consideration many factors when organizing her charts. For example, she didn’t categorize a romper with shirts, as it covers the torso and bottom half of the body. Although, she also makes short sleeve rompers which covers less than a dress. She considers amount of fabric used, style, time, and profit. Not just one of these is used to categorize but they all are. If she didn’t weigh her options, then her whole operation would likely be a mess and she would lose money.

 

Reference

Goldstein, E. B.  (2015).  Cognitive psychology: Connecting mind, research, and everyday

experience (4th ; student ed). Cengage Learning

 

Retrieval Cues Assisting Memory Retrieval

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Retrieval Cues can be described as a type of stimuli used to summon information from our memory. There are many forms of retrieval cues such as location, a smell, or a song (Goldstein, 2015). An example of a song serving as a retrieval cue can be a Wedding song dedicated to a bride and groom. Hearing that song will likely bring back similar feelings, thoughts, and events that took place on that very day. This is a specific situation which happened to me and my family the other day.

Myself, my mom, and my stepdad were rooting around in the attic at an attempt to locate the Halloween decorations (procrastination- I know). We were listening to my playlist on shuffle when their Wedding song, One Man Band by Old Dominion, started playing. For perspective, we can think of the song as an assistant when it comes to retrieval of the memory. Specifically in this case, One Man Band acted as my retrieval cue for the memory of my moms wedding. The song had no significance to me before this memory. Now when I hear it I’m reminded of the day where we got dressed up to celebrate the union of my parents and the grand emotion I felt that day. I remember the emotion and the tears, the smiles and laughs. It wasn’t my wedding, but I was still in attendance and there are a list of reasons why the memory is special to me as well which is why the song made me think of the event.

Had we not heard the song, another example of a retrieval cue of the wedding could have been the smell of the sea salt on our shells and sand we brought back with us. We could have smelled them and been reminded about the salty air during the reception. In a few years we have a scheduled trip to revisit the same beach they got married on. This would be an example of returning to the location where the original memory was formed. Retrieval cues can be provided to us in a number of different formats and be extremely helpful in memory retrieval.