Memory

The different processes that allow a person to internally store and retrieve information are collectively known as the faculty of memory. These processes range from the brief storage needed when one is dialing a telephone number to the long-term retention of the knowledge of a language.

The briefest storage process takes place in relation to perception. To understand speech, for example, a person must retain each speech unit until the end of the communication when he makes sense of what he has received. To understand a sentence, each word must be received and stored until the sentence ends. Temporary buffer stores are used which are discarded after the whole is interpreted. Other sensory information, however, is stored for fairly long periods. A smell or a music can be remembered decades after they were perceived by the senses.

Then follows the short-term memory system that stores information that is to be used immediately, as in the example already mentioned of dialing a telephone number. The characteristic of this system is its limited capacity. For example, people usually remember well numbers with 7 or 8 digits, but have difficulties to remember numbers that are 10- or 11-digits long.

A pioneer in the study of long-term memory was Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850-1909), who used the method of making people remember meaningless material. Rote learning of this kind has been afterwards criticized for ignoring the important role of meaning in retention. One of the critics has been Sir Frederic Bartlett, who said that in everyday life memory is rarely based in rote retention. Generally, one remembers the meaning of a conversation and not each word that was spoken.

The difficulty involved in constructing and testing theories using naturalistic conditions has limited research mainly to studies of rote memory. The theoretical approach of these experiments was that recalling is a stimulus-response process, where some stimulus is associated with each recollection (the response).

In the latter half of the 1960s it was proposed that individuals do not merely store information as it comes to them, but they impose some organization on it. Experiments concerning the learning of lists of words showed that people organize the words as much as they can, and that organization can improve retention. Given a list of seemingly unrelated words, the mind attempts to place some form of organization on the material. The better the organization, the more accessible the information will be in the future.

The theory of stimulus and response may explain some common experiences that everyone has had. One may, for example, try to remember the name of a person which is alluded in the course of a conversation, and be unable to do it until somebody says something that triggers the recall. When a person has difficulty in remembering something, help may be provided by hints or cues that can be considered as stimuli. Stimulus-response can also be the base of recognition, a process of great theoretical interest.

The influence of meaning is demonstrated by the use of mnemonics, that are additional cues to help information retrieving. Frequently one has to remember a series of words such as, for example, the names of the kings of some country. A mnemonics can be constructed taking the first letter of each name and using it as the first letter of a word in a meaningful sentence.

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