Understanding Memory: Encoding, Storage, and Retrieval Processes

Posted on Mar 6, 2025 in Psychology and Sociology

Understanding Memory: Encoding, Storage & Retrieval

Memory – the encoding, storage & retrieval of information.

  1. Encoding: Initial recording of information through senses & perception.
  2. Storage: Information stored in the brain for future use.
  3. Retrieval: Recovery of stored information.

Cognitive psychologists study the mind.

Three-Stage Model of Memory (Atkinson & Shiffrin Model, 1968)

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Sensory Memory: Lasts 3-4 seconds. Information not transferred is lost. It’s the initial momentary storage of information. Senses are freeze-framed, and the brain takes what it needs to the next stage of consciousness. Its precision and capacity are perfect, but its duration is not.

Short-Term Memory (STM): Lasts 15-25 seconds. It’s a major part of consciousness where we actively manipulate and use information. It can be maintained through rehearsal and holds 7 chunks of information. A chunk is a meaningful grouping of stimuli that can be stored as a unit.

Rehearsal: STM- LTM relies on repetition of information that has entered STM (maintained in STM and allows transfer to LTM).

  1. Maintenance Rehearsal: Repeated over and over until written down. When interrupted, it’s gone.
  2. Elaborative Rehearsal: Process information with meaning, most likely to go into LTM. Visual and reflective, it is organized.

Mnemonics: Formal techniques for organizing information in a way most likely to be remembered.

Working Memory: Active, temporary processes that actively manipulate and rehearse information. Contains a central executive processor involved with reasoning and decision making: 1) visual, verbal, and episodic buffer (chronological order).

Long-Term Memory (LTM): Memory stored on a relatively permanent basis, hard to retrieve. Uses semantics to encode information.

  1. Explicit (Declarative): Can bring to conscious awareness.
    1. Episodic: Personal events and experiences.
    2. Semantic: Facts.
  2. Implicit: Not consciously declared.
    1. Procedural: How to do things.
    2. Priming: Stimulus exposure affects responses to later stimuli.
    3. Emotional Conditioning: Classical conditioning of emotional responses.

Retrieval: Accessing Stored Memories

Retrieval: Information out of memory storage and back to conscious awareness.

  1. Recall: Access information without cues.
  2. Recognition: Identify information that you have previously learned after encountering it again.
  3. Relearning

Mandela Effect: Many people remember something that never happened; collective fallacies in consciousness.

Why?: Unreliability, LTM is easily amended, brain falsifies episodic memory.

The distinction between short- and long-term memory is also supported by the serial position effect, the ability to recall information depends on where in the list an item appears.

Primary effect: Early list items are remembered (less competition).

Recency effect: End list items are still fresh in STM.

Schacter’s Forgetting Types

Transience – Accessibility of memory decreases over time (storage decay).

Absentmindedness – Forgetting caused by lapses in attention.

Blocking – Accessibility of information is temporarily blocked (aka tip-of-the-tongue).

Distortion Types

Misattribution – Source of memory is confused.

Suggestibility – False memories.

Bias – Memories distorted by the current belief system.

Intrusion Types

Persistence – Inability to forget undesirable memories.