from wikipedia
In psychology, memory is an organism's ability to store, retain, and subsequently retrieve information. Traditional studies of memory began in the realms of philosophy, including techniques of artificially enhancing the memory. The late nineteenth and early twentieth century put memory within the paradigms of cognitive psychology. In recent decades, it has become one of the principal pillars of a branch of science called cognitive neuroscience, an interdisciplinary link between cognitive psychology and neuroscience.
Processes
There are several ways to classify memories, based on duration, nature and retrieval of information. From an information processing perspective there are three main stages in the formation and retrieval of memory:
Encoding or registration (processing and combining of received information)
Storage (creation of a permanent record of the encoded information)
Retrieval or recall (calling back the stored information in response to some cue for use in a process or activity)
Processes
There are several ways to classify memories, based on duration, nature and retrieval of information. From an information processing perspective there are three main stages in the formation and retrieval of memory:
Encoding or registration (processing and combining of received information)
Storage (creation of a permanent record of the encoded information)
Retrieval or recall (calling back the stored information in response to some cue for use in a process or activity)
Classification
A basic and generally accepted classification of memory is based on the duration of memory retention, and identifies three distinct types of memory: sensory memory, short term memory and long term memory.
Sensory
Sensory memory corresponds approximately to the initial 200 - 500 milliseconds after an item is perceived. The ability to look at an item, and remember what it looked like with just a second of observation, or memorization, is an example of sensory memory. With very short presentations, participants often report that they seem to "see" more than they can actually report. The first experiments exploring this form of sensory memory were conducted by George Sperling using the "partial report paradigm." Subjects were presented with a grid of 12 letters, arranged into three rows of 4. After a brief presentation, subjects were then played either a high, medium or low tone, cuing them which of the rows to report. Based on these partial report experiments, Sperling was able to show that the capacity of sensory memory was approximately 12 items, but that it degraded very quickly (within a few hundred milliseconds). Because this form of memory degrades so quickly, participants would see the display, but be unable to report all of the items (12 in the "whole report" procedure) before they decayed. This type of memory cannot be prolonged via rehearsal.
Short-term
Some of the information in sensory memory is then transferred to short-term memory. Short-term memory allows one to recall something from several seconds to as long as a minute without rehearsal. Its capacity is also very limited: George A. Miller, when working at Bell Laboratories, conducted experiments showing that the store of short term memory was 7±2 items (the title of his famous paper, "The magical number 7±2"). Modern estimates of the capacity of short-term memory are lower, typically on the order of 4-5 items, and we know that memory capacity can be increased through a process called chunking. For example, if presented with the string:
FBIPHDTWAIBM
people are able to remember only a few items. However, if the same information is presented in the following way:
FBI PHD TWA IBM
people can remember a great deal more letters. This is because they are able to chunk the information into meaningful groups of letters. Beyond finding meaning in the abbreviations above, Herbert Simon showed that the ideal size for chunking letters and numbers, meaningful or not, was three. This may be reflected in some countries in the tendency to remember phone numbers as several chunks of three numbers with the final four-number groups generally broken down into two groups of two.
Short-term memory is believed to rely mostly on an acoustic code for storing information, and to a lesser extent a visual code. Conrad (1964)[1] found that test subjects had more difficulty recalling collections of words that were acoustically similar (e.g. dog, hog, fog, bog, log)
A basic and generally accepted classification of memory is based on the duration of memory retention, and identifies three distinct types of memory: sensory memory, short term memory and long term memory.
Sensory
Sensory memory corresponds approximately to the initial 200 - 500 milliseconds after an item is perceived. The ability to look at an item, and remember what it looked like with just a second of observation, or memorization, is an example of sensory memory. With very short presentations, participants often report that they seem to "see" more than they can actually report. The first experiments exploring this form of sensory memory were conducted by George Sperling using the "partial report paradigm." Subjects were presented with a grid of 12 letters, arranged into three rows of 4. After a brief presentation, subjects were then played either a high, medium or low tone, cuing them which of the rows to report. Based on these partial report experiments, Sperling was able to show that the capacity of sensory memory was approximately 12 items, but that it degraded very quickly (within a few hundred milliseconds). Because this form of memory degrades so quickly, participants would see the display, but be unable to report all of the items (12 in the "whole report" procedure) before they decayed. This type of memory cannot be prolonged via rehearsal.
Short-term
Some of the information in sensory memory is then transferred to short-term memory. Short-term memory allows one to recall something from several seconds to as long as a minute without rehearsal. Its capacity is also very limited: George A. Miller, when working at Bell Laboratories, conducted experiments showing that the store of short term memory was 7±2 items (the title of his famous paper, "The magical number 7±2"). Modern estimates of the capacity of short-term memory are lower, typically on the order of 4-5 items, and we know that memory capacity can be increased through a process called chunking. For example, if presented with the string:
FBIPHDTWAIBM
people are able to remember only a few items. However, if the same information is presented in the following way:
FBI PHD TWA IBM
people can remember a great deal more letters. This is because they are able to chunk the information into meaningful groups of letters. Beyond finding meaning in the abbreviations above, Herbert Simon showed that the ideal size for chunking letters and numbers, meaningful or not, was three. This may be reflected in some countries in the tendency to remember phone numbers as several chunks of three numbers with the final four-number groups generally broken down into two groups of two.
Short-term memory is believed to rely mostly on an acoustic code for storing information, and to a lesser extent a visual code. Conrad (1964)[1] found that test subjects had more difficulty recalling collections of words that were acoustically similar (e.g. dog, hog, fog, bog, log)
Long-term
The storage in sensory memory and short-term memory generally have a strictly limited capacity and duration, which means that information is available for a certain period of time, but is not retained indefinitely. By contrast, long-term memory can store much larger quantities of information for potentially unlimited duration (sometimes a whole life span). For example, given a random seven-digit number, we may remember it for only a few seconds before forgetting, suggesting it was stored in our short-term memory. On the other hand, we can remember telephone numbers for many years through repetition; this information is said to be stored in long-term memory. While short-term memory encodes information acoustically, long-term memory encodes it semantically: Baddeley (1966)[2] discovered that after 20 minutes, test subjects had the least difficulty recalling a collection of words that had similar meanings (e.g. big, large, great, huge).
Short-term memory is supported by transient patterns of neuronal communication, dependent on regions of the frontal lobe (especially dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) and the parietal lobe. Long-term memories, on the other hand, are maintained by more stable and permanent changes in neural connections widely spread throughout the brain. The hippocampus is essential to the consolidation of information from short-term to long-term memory, although it does not seem to store information itself. Rather, it may be involved in changing neural connections for a period of three months or more after the initial learning.
One of the primary functions of sleep is improving consolidation of information, as it can be shown that memory depends on getting sufficient sleep between training and test, and that the hippocampus replays activity from the current day while sleeping
The storage in sensory memory and short-term memory generally have a strictly limited capacity and duration, which means that information is available for a certain period of time, but is not retained indefinitely. By contrast, long-term memory can store much larger quantities of information for potentially unlimited duration (sometimes a whole life span). For example, given a random seven-digit number, we may remember it for only a few seconds before forgetting, suggesting it was stored in our short-term memory. On the other hand, we can remember telephone numbers for many years through repetition; this information is said to be stored in long-term memory. While short-term memory encodes information acoustically, long-term memory encodes it semantically: Baddeley (1966)[2] discovered that after 20 minutes, test subjects had the least difficulty recalling a collection of words that had similar meanings (e.g. big, large, great, huge).
Short-term memory is supported by transient patterns of neuronal communication, dependent on regions of the frontal lobe (especially dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) and the parietal lobe. Long-term memories, on the other hand, are maintained by more stable and permanent changes in neural connections widely spread throughout the brain. The hippocampus is essential to the consolidation of information from short-term to long-term memory, although it does not seem to store information itself. Rather, it may be involved in changing neural connections for a period of three months or more after the initial learning.
One of the primary functions of sleep is improving consolidation of information, as it can be shown that memory depends on getting sufficient sleep between training and test, and that the hippocampus replays activity from the current day while sleeping
1 comment:
Nice compilation about memory. Its interesting to me that short term memory relies more on acoustic cues for storing, and less on visual cues; while visual memory in general is said to be stronger than verbal. Thanks for the write up.
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