Memory: Introduction and Key Components

Study Notes

Memory is the ability to store and recall information.
Memory failure is commonly experienced, for example forgetting a neighbor’s name, forgetting to tell a friend about a book to get for college, forgetting to pick up a brother after school, or forgetting to pay a friend for a loan.

Clive Wearing, a famous example of memory loss, suffered from a compromised ability to form new memories (anterograde amnesia).

There are three crucial parts:
- Encoding: How gets information into memory
- Storage: How information is maintained in memory
- Retrieval: How information is accessed from memory

Attention is critical to encoding.
Divided attention hinders memory.
Encoding can be categorized by levels of processing:
- Shallow: focusing on the physical appearance of information (e.g., the shape of a word).
- Intermediate: focusing on the sound of information (e.g., the sound of a word).
- Deep: focusing on the meaning of information (e.g., understanding the concept behind a word).
Deeper levels of processing result in longer-lasting memory codes.

Computer metaphors influenced models of memory storage, particularly the information processing models.
The multi-store model by Atkinson and Shiffrin (1970s) is a widely accepted theory.
It proposes three distinct stores:
- Sensory Memory: brief preservation of auditory, tactile, or visual information, lasting only milliseconds or seconds.
- Short-Term Memory (STM): has limited capacity, holding around 7 ± 2 units of information (Miller’s Law), and a limited duration of about 20 seconds, unless rehearsed.
- Long-Term Memory (LTM): holds information indefinitely and has unlimited capacity, with debate regarding if it’s truly permanent due to potential decay, interference, and retrieval failure.

Working memory, proposed by Baddeley and Hitch (1974), is a more dynamic concept than STM, involving not just rehearsal but also manipulation of information.

Long-term memory is further organized into logical systems such as declarative and procedural memory.

Encoding: Clive Wearing’s encoding process was severely affected, resulting in his inability to form new memories.
Working Memory: Clive Wearing’s working memory appears to have remained intact.
Sensory Memory: It is unclear if Clive Wearing was able to form new sensory memories.