Understanding Memory and Learning Processes
Understanding Memory and Learning
Memory: Definition and Types
Definition: Memory is the psychological process that retains, stores, retrieves, and deletes data.
Both types of memory work together.
Types of Memory
- Declarative Memory: This is the ability to store information related to language (numbers, addresses, theories, etc.).
- Memory of Facts: This includes stored numbers, processes, and sense of time.
Temporal Phases of Memory
- Sensory Memory: This is the most basic type, related to environmental stimuli captured only temporarily. It lasts for a very short time, focusing on immediate environmental input but not storing important information.
- Short-Term Memory: This type lasts from hours to a couple of days. It temporarily stores information to help us perform daily activities.
- Long-Term Memory: This stores relevant information for months and years, such as addition, subtraction, reading, and important occasions. This data may be lost as facts lose importance over time.
- Volatile Memory: This is essential for survival and includes two types of information:
- Vital information (e.g., learning to speak)
- Transcendent information (e.g., your name, birth date). This is only lost by accident or trauma.
Thread of Memory: Forgetting
Forgetting aims to save psychic energy, time, and space by deleting unimportant or unused information.
Alterations in Memory
- Hypermnesia: This is an extraordinary ability to retain detailed information. People with this condition may experience a long life due to information overload on their brains.
- Retrograde Amnesia: This involves forgetting traumatic events (blackouts).
- Anterograde Amnesia: The subject forgets all events preceding the traumatic event but never forgets vital information.
- Loss of Short-Term Memory: In this case, the person wakes up after a lapse of time and loses their memory.
Learning: Definition and Methods
Definition: Learning is synonymous with adaptation in core agencies. In humans, learning depends on the individual development of this capability. Learning is a change in relatively permanent behavior patterns at the primary level, which depends on our ability to adapt, but also on independent factors influencing this process (motivation, interest, self-esteem, personality types). Learning can be forgotten because the memory is not updated, and it may lose relevance. Learning begins with perception, relies on memory, and becomes transformed into something significant (staying in long-term or permanent memory).
Ways of Learning
- Imitation: Repeating the behaviors of a determined model.
- Trial and Error: Repeating the behavior even if the subject makes mistakes in reproducing it.
- Conditional Learning: Learning occurs only if the subject gets something for the behavior.
- Constructivism: The subject builds self-motivated learning.
Ivan Pavlov and Conditioning
Ivan Pavlov, a Russian physiologist of the late nineteenth century, was the first researcher of learning. Working with animals, he conducted his first experiment by examining animal behavior and observing reactions and innate reflexes. The easiest way of learning is classical conditioning or operant conditioning.
Thorndike and B.F. Skinner: Operant Conditioning
This theory applies Pavlov’s theory to humans.
- Positive Reinforcement: Behavior is repeated until the individual receives a prize; the goal is to maintain the behavior.
- Negative Reinforcement: The behavior is repeated until the individual receives punishment; the goal is to modify behavior.
Problems with the Theory
- It requires continuous reinforcement of behavior.
- If you merely reinforce, the behavior is extinguished.
- Learning is very basic and limited.
- The subject gets used to reward and punishment.