Notes on Memory

Human Memory Encoding, Storage, Retention, and Retrieval
Memory is retention of information over a period of time. Ebbinghaus studied memories by teaching himself lists of nonsense words and then studying his retention of these lists over periods of hours to days. This was one of the earliest studies of memory in psychology.

Contents:

Short Term Memory
Working Memory
Long Term Memory
Spreading Activation Model
Practice and Strength
Depth of Processing
Elaborative Processing and Text
Forgetting: Gone or Inaccessible?
Forgetting: Decay or Interference?
Retrieval and Inference
Other Facts about Memory
Short Term Memory
While Ebbinghaus studied retention over long intervals, later experiments studied memory loss over periods of seconds to minutes. Short term memory was postulated to explain temporary retention of information as distinct from long term retention of information . Short term memory acts to also store current sensory information and to rehearse new information from sensory buffers. It has limited capacity (Miller's 7 plus or minus 2). The probability of encoding in Long term memory has been directly related to time in short term memory.

It is now believed that the loss of information stored in short term memory has the same characteristics as loss of information stored in long term memory. It happens quicker because it involves information that is not learned as well. What we call the learning process is transferring information from short term to long term memory and is a physiological process. The shape of the memory loss curves are the same. Hence we don't need to postulate a special type of memory. Instead, we need a theory of:  

Why we can rehearse only a limited amount of information at a time.
How different memories get different strengths (and so are forgotten at different rates).
Working Memory
Here we address why we can rehearse only limited information at a time.

Articulatory Loop Rehearsal... [continues]

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