Memory: How We Acquire, Store, and Retrieve Information
Understanding Human Memory
Memory is the ability to acquire, store, and retrieve information. The main function of memory is to provide human beings with a knowledge base that allows us to understand the events that we live through. The first investigations on the subject were made by Frederic Hermann Ebbinghaus and George Miller. Bartlett’s Neuropsychology is the area of psychology that deals with brain-behavior relations. The neuropsychology of memory gives us new knowledge: memory has different levels of information processing. MLP (LTM) is represented in multiple regions of the brain, and memory implicitly and explicitly depends on different neural circuits.
Basic Memory Processes
Learning involves learning about the world through experience. Memory is the retention and retrieval of knowledge.
The Report Has 3 Basic Functions:
- Collect new information
- Organize information to have a meaning
- Restore information when you need to remember something
The Memories Consist of 3 Stages:
- Encoding
- Storage
- Recovery
Factors Influencing Recall:
- Remembering relates better with emotionally significant events.
- Context-dependent memory.
- Mood significantly influences memory recall.
- Filling the gaps of memory.
Forgetting is the inability to remember names, dates, facts, or knowledge. It is caused by information overload or fault recovery.
Causes of Forgetting:
- Brain injury or degeneration (Alzheimer’s, Korsakoff syndrome)
- Interference: Suppression, Proactive, Retroactive
- Lack of adequate processing
- Context
Structure and Function of Memory
There Are 3 Memory Systems:
- Sensory Memory (SM): Records the feelings and can recognize the physical characteristics of the stimuli.
- Short-Term Memory (STM): Saves the information we need in the present time.
- Long-Term Memory (LTM): Preserves our knowledge of the world for later use.
Different Long-Term Memories:
- Declarative: Stores information and knowledge of facts and events. This provides a wealth of knowledge of a person and allows us to express our thoughts.
- Procedural: The memory of abilities or skills and knowledge stored on “how to do things.” This knowledge is acquired by conditioning or repeated experiences and once established, it is unconscious.
Episodic and Semantic Memory:
- Episodic: Autobiographical memory allows us to remember dates, facts, or events experienced at one time or place.
- Semantic: Stores the knowledge of language and the world regardless of the circumstances of their learning.
Explicit and Implicit Memory:
- Explicit: Intentional and includes learning about people, places, and events that we can relate verbally and represent a conscious knowledge.
- Implicit: Is incidental; we can learn things without realizing it and without much effort.
The Information Can Be Processed at 3 Levels:
- Surface: Serving sensory traits.
- Intermediate: Enter a feature recognition.
- Depth: Serving the meaning.
Information Retrieval:
Remembering is to extract information from memory.