Which cognitive process involves organizing information into meaningful patterns?

The process of chunking is a cognitive strategy that involves organizing information into larger, more manageable units or meaningful patterns. This approach leverages the brain's ability to group information in order to enhance memory retention and recall. For example, when you try to remember a phone number, you often chunk the digits into sets (like 123-456-7890) rather than attempting to memorize each digit individually. By doing so, the amount of information needed to remember is reduced, making it easier to store and retrieve later.

While other cognitive processes like encoding (the initial process of transforming information into a form that can be stored), recoding (the process of reorganizing existing information into different forms), and rehearsing (the repetition of information to enhance memory) play important roles in memory, they do not specifically focus on the organization of information into meaningful patterns as chunking does. Therefore, chunking is particularly effective in maximizing memory efficiency by capitalizing on the way our brains naturally prefer to group related information.