essay about memory in psychology

Psychology Discussion

Essay on memory: (meaning and types).

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Read this Comprehensive Essay on Memory: Meaning, Nature and Types of Memory !

Meaning and Nature :

Memory is one of the important cognitive processes. Memory involves remembering and forgetting.

These are like two faces of a coin. Though these two are opposed to each other by nature, they play an important role in the life of an individual.

Remembering the pleasant experiences makes living happy, and on the other hand remembering unpleasant experiences makes living unhappy and miserable. So here forgetting helps individual to forget unwanted and unpleasant experiences and memories and keeps him happy.

In this way, remembering the pleasant and forgetting the- unpleasant both are essential for normal living. In the case of learners, remembering is very important, because without memory there would be no learning.

If learning has to progress, remembering of what is already learnt is indispensable, otherwise every time the learner has to start from the beginning.

The memory is defined as ‘the power to store experiences and to bring them into the field of consciousness sometime after the experience has occurred’. Our mind has the power of conserving experiences and mentally receiving them whenever such an activity helps the onward progress of the life cycle.

The conserved experience has a unity, an organisation of its own and it colours our present experience.

However, as stated above we have a notion that memory is a single process, but an analysis of it reveals involvement of three different activities- learning, retention and remembering.

This is the first stage of memory. Learning may be by any of the methods like imitation, verbal, motor, conceptual, trial and error, insight, etc. Hence, whatever may be the type of learning; we must pay our attention to retain what is learnt. A good learning is necessary for better retention.

Retention is the process of retaining in mind what is learnt or experienced in the past. The learnt material must be retained in order to make progress in our learning. Psychologists are of the opinion that the learnt material will be retained in the brain in the form of neural traces called ‘memory traces’, or ‘engrams’, or ‘neurograms’.

When good learning takes place –clear engrams are formed, so that they remain for long time and can be remembered by activation of these traces whenever necessary.

Remembering:

It is the process of bringing back the stored or retained information to the conscious level. This may be understood by activities such as recalling, recognising, relearning and reconstruction.

Recalling is the process of reproducing the past experiences that are not present. For example, recalling answers in the examination hall.

Recognising:

It is to recognise a person seen earlier, or the original items seen earlier, from among the items of the same class or category which they are mixed-up.

Relearning:

Relearning is also known as saving method. Because we measure retention in terms of saving in the number of repetition or the time required to relearn the assignment. The difference between the amount of time or trials required for original learning and the one required for relearning indicates the amount of retention.

Reconstruction:

Reconstruction is otherwise called rearrangement. Here the material to learn will be presented in a particular order and then the items will be jumbled up or shuffled thoroughly and presented to the individual to rearrange them in the original order in which it was presented.

Types of Memory :

There are five kinds of memory. These are classified on the basis of rates of decay of the information.

a. Sensory memory:

In this kind of memory, the information received by the sense organs will remain there for a very short period like few seconds. For example, the image on the screen of a TV may appear to be in our eyes for a fraction of time even when it is switched off, or the voice of a person will be tingling in our ears even after the voice is ceased.

b. Short-term memory (STM):

According to many studies, in STM the memory remains in our conscious and pre-conscious level for less than 30 seconds. Later on this will be transferred to long-term memory.

c. Long-term memory (LTM):

LTM has the unlimited capacity to store information which may remain for days, months, years or lifetime.

d. Eidetic memory:

It is otherwise called photographic memory in which the individual can remember a scene or an event in a photographic detail.

e. Episodic memory:

This is otherwise called semantic memory which is connected with episodes of events. The events are stored in the form of episodes and recalled fully in the manner of a sequence.

Related Articles:

• 11 Factors that Influence Memory Process in Humans
• 7 Main Factors that Influence Retention Power | Memory | Psychology
• Essay on Forgetting: Causes and Theories
• Memory Types: 3 Main Types of Memory | Remembering | Psychology

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• How Memory Works

Memory is the ongoing process of information retention over time. Because it makes up the very framework through which we make sense of and take action within the present, its importance goes without saying. But how exactly does it work? And how can teachers apply a better understanding of its inner workings to their own teaching? In light of current research in cognitive science, the very, very short answer to these questions is that memory operates according to a "dual-process," where more unconscious, more routine thought processes (known as "System 1") interact with more conscious, more problem-based thought processes (known as "System 2"). At each of these two levels, in turn, there are the processes through which we "get information in" (encoding), how we hold on to it (storage), and and how we "get it back out" (retrieval or recall). With a basic understanding of how these elements of memory work together, teachers can maximize student learning by knowing how much new information to introduce, when to introduce it, and how to sequence assignments that will both reinforce the retention of facts (System 1) and build toward critical, creative thinking (System 2).

Dual-Process Theory

Think back to a time when you learned a new skill, such as driving a car, riding a bicycle, or reading. When you first learned this skill, performing it was an active process in which you analyzed and were acutely aware of every movement you made. Part of this analytical process also meant that you thought carefully about why you were doing what you were doing, to understand how these individual steps fit together as a comprehensive whole. However, as your ability improved, performing the skill stopped being a cognitively-demanding process, instead becoming more intuitive. As you continue to master the skill, you can perform other, at times more intellectually-demanding, tasks simultaneously. Due to your knowledge of this skill or process being unconscious, you could, for example, solve an unrelated complex problem or make an analytical decision while completing it.

In its simplest form, the scenario above is an example of what psychologists call dual-process theory. The term “dual-process” refers to the idea that some behaviors and cognitive processes (such as decision-making) are the products of two distinct cognitive processes, often called System 1 and System 2 (Kaufmann, 2011:443-445). While System 1 is characterized by automatic, unconscious thought, System 2 is characterized by effortful, analytical, intentional thought (Osman, 2004:989).

Dual-Process Theories and Learning

How do System 1 and System 2 thinking relate to teaching and learning? In an educational context, System 1 is associated with memorization and recall of information, while System 2 describes more analytical or critical thinking. Memory and recall, as a part of System 1 cognition, are focused on in the rest of these notes.

As mentioned above, System 1 is characterized by its fast, unconscious recall of previously-memorized information. Classroom activities that would draw heavily on System 1 include memorized multiplication tables, as well as multiple-choice exam questions that only need exact regurgitation from a source such as a textbook. These kinds of tasks do not require students to actively analyze what is being asked of them beyond reiterating memorized material. System 2 thinking becomes necessary when students are presented with activities and assignments that require them to provide a novel solution to a problem, engage in critical thinking, or apply a concept outside of the domain in which it was originally presented.  

It may be tempting to think of learning beyond the primary school level as being all about System 2, all the time. However, it’s important to keep in mind that successful System 2 thinking depends on a lot of System 1 thinking to operate. In other words, critical thinking requires a lot of memorized knowledge and intuitive, automatic judgments to be performed quickly and accurately.

How does Memory Work?

In its simplest form, memory refers to the continued process of information retention over time. It is an integral part of human cognition, since it allows individuals to recall and draw upon past events to frame their understanding of and behavior within the present. Memory also gives individuals a framework through which to make sense of the present and future. As such, memory plays a crucial role in teaching and learning. There are three main processes that characterize how memory works. These processes are encoding, storage, and retrieval (or recall).

• Encoding . Encoding refers to the process through which information is learned. That is, how information is taken in, understood, and altered to better support storage (which you will look at in Section 3.1.2). Information is usually encoded through one (or more) of four methods: (1) Visual encoding (how something looks); (2) acoustic encoding (how something sounds); (3) semantic encoding (what something means); and (4) tactile encoding (how something feels). While information typically enters the memory system through one of these modes, the form in which this information is stored may differ from its original, encoded form (Brown, Roediger, & McDaniel, 2014).

• Retrieval . As indicated above, retrieval is the process through which individuals access stored information. Due to their differences, information stored in STM and LTM are retrieved differently. While STM is retrieved in the order in which it is stored (for example, a sequential list of numbers), LTM is retrieved through association (for example, remembering where you parked your car by returning to the entrance through which you accessed a shopping mall) (Roediger & McDermott, 1995).

Improving Recall

Retrieval is subject to error, because it can reflect a reconstruction of memory. This reconstruction becomes necessary when stored information is lost over time due to decayed retention. In 1885, Hermann Ebbinghaus conducted an experiment in which he tested how well individuals remembered a list of nonsense syllables over increasingly longer periods of time. Using the results of his experiment, he created what is now known as the “Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve” (Schaefer, 2015).

Through his research, Ebbinghaus concluded that the rate at which your memory (of recently learned information) decays depends both on the time that has elapsed following your learning experience as well as how strong your memory is. Some degree of memory decay is inevitable, so, as an educator, how do you reduce the scope of this memory loss? The following sections answer this question by looking at how to improve recall within a learning environment, through various teaching and learning techniques.

As a teacher, it is important to be aware of techniques that you can use to promote better retention and recall among your students. Three such techniques are the testing effect, spacing, and interleaving.

• The testing effect . In most traditional educational settings, tests are normally considered to be a method of periodic but infrequent assessment that can help a teacher understand how well their students have learned the material at hand. However, modern research in psychology suggests that frequent, small tests are also one of the best ways to learn in the first place. The testing effect refers to the process of actively and frequently testing memory retention when learning new information. By encouraging students to regularly recall information they have recently learned, you are helping them to retain that information in long-term memory, which they can draw upon at a later stage of the learning experience (Brown, Roediger, & McDaniel, 2014). As secondary benefits, frequent testing allows both the teacher and the student to keep track of what a student has learned about a topic, and what they need to revise for retention purposes. Frequent testing can occur at any point in the learning process. For example, at the end of a lecture or seminar, you could give your students a brief, low-stakes quiz or free-response question asking them to remember what they learned that day, or the day before. This kind of quiz will not just tell you what your students are retaining, but will help them remember more than they would have otherwise.
• Spacing.  According to the spacing effect, when a student repeatedly learns and recalls information over a prolonged time span, they are more likely to retain that information. This is compared to learning (and attempting to retain) information in a short time span (for example, studying the day before an exam). As a teacher, you can foster this approach to studying in your students by structuring your learning experiences in the same way. For example, instead of introducing a new topic and its related concepts to students in one go, you can cover the topic in segments over multiple lessons (Brown, Roediger, & McDaniel, 2014).
• Interleaving.  The interleaving technique is another teaching and learning approach that was introduced as an alternative to a technique known as “blocking”. Blocking refers to when a student practices one skill or one topic at a time. Interleaving, on the other hand, is when students practice multiple related skills in the same session. This technique has proven to be more successful than the traditional blocking technique in various fields (Brown, Roediger, & McDaniel, 2014).

As useful as it is to know which techniques you can use, as a teacher, to improve student recall of information, it is also crucial for students to be aware of techniques they can use to improve their own recall. This section looks at four of these techniques: state-dependent memory, schemas, chunking, and deliberate practice.

• State-dependent memory . State-dependent memory refers to the idea that being in the same state in which you first learned information enables you to better remember said information. In this instance, “state” refers to an individual’s surroundings, as well as their mental and physical state at the time of learning (Weissenborn & Duka, 2000). 
• Schemas.  Schemas refer to the mental frameworks an individual creates to help them understand and organize new information. Schemas act as a cognitive “shortcut” in that they allow individuals to interpret new information quicker than when not using schemas. However, schemas may also prevent individuals from learning pertinent information that falls outside the scope of the schema that has been created. It is because of this that students should be encouraged to alter or reanalyze their schemas, when necessary, when they learn important information that may not confirm or align with their existing beliefs and conceptions of a topic.
• Chunking.  Chunking is the process of grouping pieces of information together to better facilitate retention. Instead of recalling each piece individually, individuals recall the entire group, and then can retrieve each item from that group more easily (Gobet et al., 2001).
• Deliberate practice.  The final technique that students can use to improve recall is deliberate practice. Simply put, deliberate practice refers to the act of deliberately and actively practicing a skill with the intention of improving understanding of and performance in said skill. By encouraging students to practice a skill continually and deliberately (for example, writing a well-structured essay), you will ensure better retention of that skill (Brown et al., 2014).

For more information...

Brown, P.C., Roediger, H.L. & McDaniel, M.A. 2014.  Make it stick: The science of successful learning . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Gobet, F., Lane, P.C., Croker, S., Cheng, P.C., Jones, G., Oliver, I. & Pine, J.M. 2001. Chunking mechanisms in human learning.  Trends in Cognitive Sciences . 5(6):236-243.

Kaufman, S.B. 2011. Intelligence and the cognitive unconscious. In  The Cambridge handbook of intelligence . R.J. Sternberg & S.B. Kaufman, Eds. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Osman, M. 2004. An evaluation of dual-process theories of reasoning. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review . 11(6):988-1010.

Roediger, H.L. & McDermott, K.B. 1995. Creating false memories: Remembering words not presented in lists.  Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition . 21(4):803.

Schaefer, P. 2015. Why Google has forever changed the forgetting curve at work.

Weissenborn, R. & Duka, T. 2000. State-dependent effects of alcohol on explicit memory: The role of semantic associations.  Psychopharmacology . 149(1):98-106.

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• Memory Psychology

10 Influential Memory Theories and Studies in Psychology

Discover the experiments and theories that shaped our understanding of how we develop and recall memories..

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How do our memories store information? Why is it that we can recall a memory at will from decades ago, and what purpose does forgetting information serve?

The human memory has been the subject of investigation among many 20th Century psychologists and remains an active area of study for today’s cognitive scientists. Below we take a look at some of the most influential studies, experiments and theories that continue to guide our understanding of the function of memory.

1 Multi-Store Model

(atkinson & shiffrin, 1968).

An influential theory of memory known as the multi-store model was proposed by Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin in 1968. This model suggested that information exists in one of 3 states of memory: the sensory, short-term and long-term stores . Information passes from one stage to the next the more we rehearse it in our minds, but can fade away if we do not pay enough attention to it. Read More

Information enters the memory from the senses - for instance, the eyes observe a picture, olfactory receptors in the nose might smell coffee or we might hear a piece of music. This stream of information is held in the sensory memory store , and because it consists of a huge amount of data describing our surroundings, we only need to remember a small portion of it. As a result, most sensory information ‘ decays ’ and is forgotten after a short period of time. A sight or sound that we might find interesting captures our attention, and our contemplation of this information - known as rehearsal - leads to the data being promoted to the short-term memory store , where it will be held for a few hours or even days in case we need access to it.

The short-term memory gives us access to information that is salient to our current situation, but is limited in its capacity.

Therefore, we need to further rehearse information in the short-term memory to remember it for longer. This may involve merely recalling and thinking about a past event, or remembering a fact by rote - by thinking or writing about it repeatedly. Rehearsal then further promotes this significant information to the long-term memory store, where Atkinson and Shiffrin believed that it could survive for years, decades or even a lifetime.

Key information regarding people that we have met, important life events and other important facts makes it through the sensory and short-term memory stores to reach the long-term memory .

Learn more about Atkinson and Shiffrin’s Multi-Store Model

2 Levels of Processing

(craik & lockhart, 1972).

Fergus Craik and Robert Lockhart were critical of explanation for memory provided by the multi-store model, so in 1972 they proposed an alternative explanation known as the levels of processing effect . According to this model, memories do not reside in 3 stores; instead, the strength of a memory trace depends upon the quality of processing , or rehearsal , of a stimulus . In other words, the more we think about something, the more long-lasting the memory we have of it ( Craik & Lockhart , 1972). Read More

Craik and Lockhart distinguished between two types of processing that take place when we make an observation : shallow and deep processing. Shallow processing - considering the overall appearance or sound of something - generally leads to a stimuli being forgotten. This explains why we may walk past many people in the street on a morning commute, but not remember a single face by lunch time.

Deep (or semantic) processing , on the other hand, involves elaborative rehearsal - focusing on a stimulus in a more considered way, such as thinking about the meaning of a word or the consequences of an event. For example, merely reading a news story involves shallow processing, but thinking about the repercussions of the story - how it will affect people - requires deep processing, which increases the likelihood of details of the story being memorized.

In 1975, Craik and another psychologist, Endel Tulving , published the findings of an experiment which sought to test the levels of processing effect.

Participants were shown a list of 60 words, which they then answered a question about which required either shallow processing or more elaborative rehearsal. When the original words were placed amongst a longer list of words, participants who had conducted deeper processing of words and their meanings were able to pick them out more efficiently than those who had processed the mere appearance or sound of words ( Craik & Tulving , 1975).

Learn more about Levels of Processing here

3 Working Memory Model

(baddeley & hitch, 1974).

Whilst the Multi-Store Model (see above) provided a compelling insight into how sensory information is filtered and made available for recall according to its importance to us, Alan Baddeley and Graham Hitch viewed the short-term memory (STM) store as being over-simplistic and proposed a working memory model (Baddeley & Hitch, 1974), which replace the STM.

The working memory model proposed 2 components - a visuo-spatial sketchpad (the ‘inner eye’) and an articulatory-phonological loop (the ‘inner ear’), which focus on a different types of sensory information. Both work independently of one another, but are regulated by a central executive , which collects and processes information from the other components similarly to how a computer processor handles data held separately on a hard disk. Read More

According to Baddeley and Hitch, the visuo-spatial sketchpad handles visual data - our observations of our surroundings - and spatial information - our understanding of objects’ size and location in our environment and their position in relation to ourselves. This enables us to interact with objects: to pick up a drink or avoid walking into a door, for example.

The visuo-spatial sketchpad also enables a person to recall and consider visual information stored in the long-term memory. When you try to recall a friend’s face, your ability to visualize their appearance involves the visuo-spatial sketchpad.

The articulatory-phonological loop handles the sounds and voices that we hear. Auditory memory traces are normally forgotten but may be rehearsed using the ‘inner voice’; a process which can strengthen our memory of a particular sound.

Learn more about Baddeley and Hitch’s working memory model here

4 Miller’s Magic Number

(miller, 1956).

Prior to the working memory model, U.S. cognitive psychologist George A. Miller questioned the limits of the short-term memory’s capacity. In a renowned 1956 paper published in the journal Psychological Review , Miller cited the results of previous memory experiments, concluding that people tend only to be able to hold, on average, 7 chunks of information (plus or minus two) in the short-term memory before needing to further process them for longer storage. For instance, most people would be able to remember a 7-digit phone number but would struggle to remember a 10-digit number. This led to Miller describing the number 7 +/- 2 as a “magical” number in our understanding of memory. Read More

But why are we able to remember the whole sentence that a friend has just uttered, when it consists of dozens of individual chunks in the form of letters? With a background in linguistics, having studied speech at the University of Alabama, Miller understood that the brain was able to ‘chunk’ items of information together and that these chunks counted towards the 7-chunk limit of the STM. A long word, for example, consists of many letters, which in turn form numerous phonemes. Instead of only being able to remember a 7-letter word, the mind “recodes” it, chunking the individual items of data together. This process allows us to boost the limits of recollection to a list of 7 separate words.

Miller’s understanding of the limits of human memory applies to both the short-term store in the multi-store model and Baddeley and Hitch’s working memory. Only through sustained effort of rehearsing information are we able to memorize data for longer than a short period of time.

Read more about Miller’s Magic Number here

5 Memory Decay

(peterson and peterson, 1959).

Following Miller’s ‘magic number’ paper regarding the capacity of the short-term memory, Peterson and Peterson set out to measure memories’ longevity - how long will a memory last without being rehearsed before it is forgotten completely?

In an experiment employing a Brown-Peterson task, participants were given a list of trigrams - meaningless lists of 3 letters (e.g. GRT, PXM, RBZ) - to remember. After the trigrams had been shown, participants were asked to count down from a number, and to recall the trigrams at various periods after remembering them. Read More

The use of such trigrams makes it impracticable for participants to assign meaning to the data to help encode them more easily, while the interference task prevented rehearsal, enabling the researchers to measure the duration of short-term memories more accurately.

Whilst almost all participants were initially able to recall the trigrams, after 18 seconds recall accuracy fell to around just 10%. Peterson and Peterson’s study demonstrated the surprising brevity of memories in the short-term store, before decay affects our ability to recall them.

Learn more about memory decay here

6 Flashbulb Memories

(brown & kulik, 1977).

There are particular moments in living history that vast numbers of people seem to hold vivid recollections of. You will likely be able to recall such an event that you hold unusually detailed memories of yourself. When many people learned that JFK, Elvis Presley or Princess Diana died, or they heard of the terrorist attacks taking place in New York City in 2001, a detailed memory seems to have formed of what they were doing at the particular moment that they heard such news.

Psychologists Roger Brown and James Kulik recognized this memory phenomenon as early as 1977, when they published a paper describing flashbulb memories - vivid and highly detailed snapshots created often (but not necessarily) at times of shock or trauma. Read More

We are able to recall minute details of our personal circumstances whilst engaging in otherwise mundane activities when we learnt of such events. Moreover, we do not need to be personally connected to an event for it to affect us, and for it lead to the creation of a flashbulb memory.

Learn more about Flashbulb Memories here

7 Memory and Smell

The link between memory and sense of smell helps many species - not just humans - to survive. The ability to remember and later recognize smells enables animals to detect the nearby presence of members of the same group, potential prey and predators. But how has this evolutionary advantage survived in modern-day humans?

Researchers at the University of North Carolina tested the olfactory effects on memory encoding and retrieval in a 1989 experiment. Male college students were shown a series of slides of pictures of females, whose attractiveness they were asked to rate on a scale. Whilst viewing the slides, the participants were exposed to pleasant odor of aftershave or an unpleasant smell. Their recollection of the faces in the slides was later tested in an environment containing either the same or a different scent. Read More

The results showed that participants were better able to recall memories when the scent at the time of encoding matched that at the time of recall (Cann and Ross, 1989). These findings suggest that a link between our sense of smell and memories remains, even if it provides less of a survival advantage than it did for our more primitive ancestors.

8 Interference

Interference theory postulates that we forget memories due to other memories interfering with our recall. Interference can be either retroactive or proactive: new information can interfere with older memories (retroactive interference), whilst information we already know can affect our ability to memorize new information (proactive interference).

Both types of interference are more likely to occur when two memories are semantically related, as demonstrated in a 1960 experiment in which two groups of participants were given a list of word pairs to remember, so that they could recall the second ‘response’ word when given the first as a stimulus. A second group was also given a list to learn, but afterwards was asked to memorize a second list of word pairs. When both groups were asked to recall the words from the first list, those who had just learnt that list were able to recall more words than the group that had learnt a second list (Underwood & Postman, 1960). This supported the concept of retroactive interference: the second list impacted upon memories of words from the first list. Read More

Interference also works in the opposite direction: existing memories sometimes inhibit our ability to memorize new information. This might occur when you receive a work schedule, for instance. When you are given a new schedule a few months later, you may find yourself adhering to the original times. The schedule that you already knew interferes with your memory of the new schedule.

9 False Memories

Can false memories be implanted in our minds? The idea may sound like the basis of a dystopian science fiction story, but evidence suggests that memories that we already hold can be manipulated long after their encoding. Moreover, we can even be coerced into believing invented accounts of events to be true, creating false memories that we then accept as our own.

Cognitive psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has spent much of her life researching the reliability of our memories; particularly in circumstances when their accuracy has wider consequences, such as the testimonials of eyewitness in criminal trials. Loftus found that the phrasing of questions used to extract accounts of events can lead witnesses to attest to events inaccurately. Read More

In one experiment, Loftus showed a group of participants a video of a car collision, where the vehicle was travelling at a one of a variety of speeds. She then asked them the car’s speed using a sentence whose depiction of the crash was adjusted from mild to severe using different verbs. Loftus found when the question suggested that the crash had been severe, participants disregarded their video observation and vouched that the car had been travelling faster than if the crash had been more of a gentle bump (Loftus and Palmer, 1974). The use of framed questions, as demonstrated by Loftus, can retroactively interfere with existing memories of events.

James Coan (1997) demonstrated that false memories can even be produced of entire events. He produced booklets detailing various childhood events and gave them to family members to read. The booklet given to his brother contained a false account of him being lost in a shopping mall, being found by an older man and then finding his family. When asked to recall the events, Coan’s brother believed the lost in a mall story to have actually occurred, and even embellished the account with his own details (Coan, 1997).

Read more about false memories here

10 The Weapon Effect on Eyewitness Testimonies

(johnson & scott, 1976).

A person’s ability to memorize an event inevitably depends not just on rehearsal but also on the attention paid to it at the time it occurred. In a situation such as an bank robbery, you may have other things on your mind besides memorizing the appearance of the perpetrator. But witness’s ability to produce a testimony can sometimes be affected by whether or not a gun was involved in a crime. This phenomenon is known as the weapon effect - when a witness is involved in a situation in which a weapon is present, they have been found to remember details less accurately than a similar situation without a weapon. Read More

The weapon effect on eyewitness testimonies was the subject of a 1976 experiment in which participants situated in a waiting room watched as a man left a room carrying a pen in one hand. Another group of participants heard an aggressive argument, and then saw a man leave a room carrying a blood-stained knife.

Later, when asked to identify the man in a line-up, participants who saw the man carrying a weapon were less able to identify him than those who had seen the man carrying a pen (Johnson & Scott, 1976). Witnesses’ focus of attention had been distracted by a weapon, impeding their ability to remember other details of the event.

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5 Module 5: Memory

Memory plays a key role in many areas of our lives, not the least of which is school. To understand why we remember and forget, you need to consider the entire memory process. Here’s a very simple description: First, you have to get information into your memory systems; call this process  encoding . When you need to get information out of memory (for example, when you are taking an exam, or telling a story), you use the process called  retrieval . In between encoding and retrieval we have, of course, memory  storage .

Failure to remember information—that is, forgetting—can occur because of a breakdown at any of the three points (encoding, storage, retrieval). The typical culprits in the failure to remember, however, are encoding and retrieval problems. That’s why most of this module is devoted to encoding and retrieval. But first you need to understand the basic layout of memory, which is a key element of cognition.

This module breaks psychologists’ basic understanding of memory into six sections. First it explains that not all forms of memory are alike and describes some of the different memory systems. The section introduces principles of encoding and explains how recoding is one of the keys to effective memory. The third section describes the processes that take place in the brain when information is encoded and stored in memory. The fourth section covers memory retrieval. The final section describes how memories are constructed and, sometimes, distorted.

5.1 Memory Systems

5.2 Encoding and Recoding

5.3 Memory Storage and Memory in the Brain

5.4 Memory Retrieval

5.5 memory construction and distortion.

encoding : putting information into memory systems

retrieval : taking information out of memory systems

storage :  keeping memories in the brain for future use

READING WITH PURPOSE

Remember and understand.

By reading and studying Module 5, you should be able to remember and describe:

• Distinctions among encoding, storage, and retrieval (5 introduction)
• Characteristics of sensory memory, working memory, and long-term memory (5.1)
• Characteristics of procedural memory and declarative memory (5.1)
• Methods of rehearsal for encoding: repetition, auditory encoding, semantic encoding (5.2)
• Strategies for semantic encoding: elaborative verbal rehearsal, self reference, mental images (5.2)
• Organizing to encode (5.3)
• Concept map and neural networks (5.4)
• Parts of a neuron: axon, dendrites, cell body (5.4)
• Synaptic plasticity (5.4)
• Retrieval cues (5.5)
• Memory distortion (5.6)

By reading and thinking about how the concepts in Module 5 apply to real life, you should be able to:

• Identify different kinds of memory (5.1)
• Characterize your own typical study strategies in terms of encoding and retrieval principles (5.2, 5.3, 5.5)
• Recognize a memory from your own life that might be distorted (5.6)

Analyze, Evaluate, and Create

By reading and thinking about Module 5, participating in classroom activities, and completing out-of-class assignments, you should be able to:

• Devise a strategy for studying that uses encoding and retrieval principles (5.2, 5.3, 5.5)
• Recognize a situation in which you would suspect a memory distortion (5.6)
• Can you think of more than one kind of memory that you have drawn upon?
• Why can you remember a birthday party you attended years ago, but forget what your instructor said seconds ago? 
• Is it true that some memories can last a lifetime?
• Is it true that “you never forget how to ride a bicycle?” 

When you first start to think about it, memory might seem pretty simple.  But consider some of the memories you might have:

• What you had for breakfast this morning
• Your 10th birthday party
• The address someone just left on your voicemail
• Your phone number
• What your best friend looks like
• What a cat is
• How to read
• What you read in section 1.2 of this book
• The answer to question 3 on your History mid-term
• The name of the person you just met
• How to do a cartwheel

All of these phenomena are, at their core, memories, which means that they share some fundamental properties. Yet they have significant differences, too. It has been a major accomplishment of memory researchers to describe the different types of memory systems and processes, and determine the specific properties of each one.

Distinguishing by duration and purpose of the memory

We have two major memory systems that help to explain how memories are stored: working memory (sometimes referred to as short-term memory, although the actual meaning is not identical) and long-term memory. The process of creating a memory that you will remember for a test you will be taking next week and beyond involves both systems working together.

Soon after information is first encountered, it enters the system called working memory, simply by virtue of the fact that you pay attention to it (Baddeley and Hitch, 1974). The best way to understand working memory is to think of it as the current contents of your consciousness—that is, whatever you are thinking about right now. So as you are sitting at your desk staring at a textbook, the words that you pay attention to enter into working memory. You hold information in working memory either because you are going to use it (for example, to solve some problem) or because you will be trying to transfer, or encode it, into long-term memory.

Long-term memory is the memory system that holds information for periods of time ranging from a few minutes to many years. If you do not use or transfer the information in working memory into long-term memory, it will be forgotten, probably in less than thirty seconds (Peterson & Peterson, 1959).

One fact you should realize about working memory is that its capacity is limited. Psychologists had thought that people can generally hold about 7 pieces, or  chunk s, of information in working memory at one time (Miller, 1956). A chunk is a unit of meaningful information. For example, an individual letter might be a chunk. If the letters can be ordered to form words or abbreviations, then these are the chunks. More recently, however, researchers have proposed that memory capacity is a function of time, not quantity. Specifically, our working memory may hold the amount of information that we can process in about two seconds (Baddeley, 1986, 1996).

If you manage to get the information from working memory encoded into long-term memory, it is possible that you can retain that information for many years. It can even last a lifetime; picture a 92 year-old grandmother who still tells stories about her childhood in Italy. Also, although that “I can’t study any more because my brain is full” feeling may make you think otherwise, you can essentially store a limitless amount of information in long-term memory (Landauer, 1986).

One of the keys to good memory, then, is to have effective strategies for encoding information into long-term memory (see section 5.2). You typically store the general meaning of information in long-term memory, however, rather than precisely what you encountered (Brewer, 1977).

Working memory and long-term memory are not the only two memory storage systems. Another one is called  sensory memory , and it actually comes into play before working memory does (Sperling, 1960; Crowder & Morton, 1969). Sensory memory is an extremely accurate, very short duration system. It essentially stores the information taken in by the senses, vision and hearing, just long enough (about a second) to allow you to direct attention to it so you can get the information into working memory.

Distinguishing by the kind of information in the memory

Can you do a backflip? Former World’s Strongest Man Eddie Hall can.

Procedural Memory

This ability to do a backflip is a skill, or a memory, like riding a bicycle, tying one’s shoes, or hitting a tennis ball. These types of memories, however, seem very different from remembering what you had for dinner last night or remembering that Albany is the capital of New York.

Psychologists, too, have noticed this distinction and have given the two kinds of memories different names.  Procedural memory refers to skills and procedures. These are memories for things that you can do.  Declarative memory refers to facts and episodes (Cohen & Eichenbaum, 1993). Declarative memory is further subdivided into  semantic memory —your general store of knowledge, such as facts and word meanings, and  episodic memory — memory for events, or episodes from your life. So, if you remember that Bismarck is the capital of North Dakota, it is semantic memory, unless you remember the exact time that you learned this fact (in 5th grade social studies, for example), in which case it would be episodic memory. So you see, as the details about when we first learned some piece of information fade, episodic memories can become semantic memory.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=8Ik57i3e7NE

Declarative Memory

Procedural memory seems to operate by different rules than declarative memory. For example, when we talk about transferring information from working memory to long-term memory (encoding) and retrieving information from long-term memory back into working memory, we are talking about declarative memory only. There is no working memory for procedures. Acquiring a procedural memory typically takes much more practice than acquiring a declarative memory does. But once a skill is acquired (that is, once it becomes part of your procedural memory), it may well be there to stay. So, at least for some people, it is probably true that you never forget how to ride a bicycle.

(See Module 9 for a related distinction called explicit and implicit memory)

chunk : a unit of meaningful information

declarative memory : memory for facts and episodes

episodic memory : the part of declarative memory that refers to specific events or episodes from someone’s life

long-term memory : an essentially unlimited, nearly permanent memory storage system

procedural memory : memory for skills and procedures

semantic memory : the part of declarative memory that refers to one’s general store of knowledge

sensory memory : a very short (about one second), extremely accurate memory system that holds information long enough for an individual to pay attention to it

working memory : a short-term memory storage system that holds information in consciousness for immediate use or to transfer it into long long-term memory

• Think about the last time you forgot something. Was the forgetting a problem with working memory or long-term memory?
• What is your most interesting procedural memory? Have you ever tried to teach it to someone else? If so, how did you do it?
• What is your earliest declarative memory? (Use an episode from your life rather than trying to figure out the first fact that you learned.) Do you think that your declarative memory is good or poor?

5.2 Recode to Encode

• Have you ever finished reading a short section from a textbook and immediately realized that you have already forgotten what you just read?
• Have you ever looked at the first question on an exam for which you thought you had studied well and thought, “I have never seen this concept before in my life; am I in the right room?”
• Do you find yourself able to remember unimportant material for a class (for example, material not on the test) and unable to remember important material?
• Please turn to the beginning of Module 5. Notice the description and list of all the sections that fit within the Module. Now go find a couple of textbooks from your other classes and look at the outlines in the first pages of some chapters or at least at the table of contents. (Seriously, go look! We’ll wait.) Why are these outlines included?

Think about your best friend for a moment. What were they wearing the last time you were together? You will often find yourself unable to remember information like this. Why? Because you probably never attempted to encode that information from working memory into long-term memory. You didn’t look at your friend and say, “Lisa looks so good today; I’m going to remember what she is wearing!”

Certainly, information sometimes makes it into long-term memory without you engaging in purposeful encoding. Perhaps you have an annoying song going through your head right now. It is not very likely that when you first heard the song, you said to yourself, “Hey, I better make sure I memorize this song.” (You might be interested to know that psychologists have studied this phenomenon of annoying songs you cannot get out of your head. They call them earworms –see Jakubowski et al. 2017). But do not count on this accidental encoding to provide you with a solid memory when you need it. The simple truth is if you want to be able to retrieve information from long-term memory, you have to do a very good job of putting it in there in the first place.

How do you effectively encode information into long-term memory?

The basic strategy that people use to encode information from working memory into long-term memory is  rehearsal. All of the encoding strategies in this module are kinds of rehearsal. The simplest kind of rehearsal is straight  repetition.  Imagine trying to learn your French vocabulary words by mentally running through the vocabulary list over and over until you get them all right. It works ok, as long as the test was soon after you finish studying (about 15 seconds seems to be the ideal delay; anything more than that and you start forgetting). Although it may be one of the most common rehearsal strategies and is the one favored by many students, repetition is probably one of the least effective. Call this encoding without recoding. And the advice about it bears repeating: Encoding without recoding (in other words, straight repetition) is a poor way to encode information from working memory into long-term memory.

One specific situation in which many people have difficulty encoding is when they read textbooks. Have you ever read a paragraph, realized that you have immediately forgotten it, and as a consequence decided to re-read it? Often, the problem is that you are merely reading the words over in your head, making sure you can “hear” yourself silently saying the words. In this case, you are  recoding : transforming the information from one form into another. But the transformation in this case is minor and not very useful. Psychologists call it  auditory encoding or  acoustic encoding . Auditory encoding is ok. Many students rely on it, and with enough effort they do fairly well at school.

In order to remember better, however, there is no question that you should try to move to the next level of recoding, in which you transform the information into something meaningful. For example, Craik and Tulving (1975) developed the idea of  semantic encoding (Craik & Tulving 1975). Semantic means “meaning,” so semantic encoding refers to mentally processing the meaning of information. For example, you should pay attention to patterns and relationships and their significance, rather than just the words or numbers themselves.

Psychologist F. I. M. Craik and his colleagues demonstrated the benefits of using semantic encoding in a famous series of experiments during the 1970’s (Craik and Lockhart, 1972; Craik and Tulving, 1975). These experiments examined what Craik termed  levels of processing. In a typical experiment, participants would read a list of words with instructions that would encourage one specific type of encoding. The shallowest encoding strategy (or level of processing) required participants to pay attention to the visual appearance and shapes of the letters only. For example, a shallow encoding strategy would be to count how many straight and curved letters there are in each word. Note that you do not even need to read the words in order to use this strategy, so it would seem to be quite a poor recoding strategy. Somewhat “deeper” encoding strategies were those that required participants to pay attention to more properties of the words, such as the auditory qualities. For example, judging whether the word rhymes with a specific word is a deeper encoding strategy, an acoustic one. Note that you do not need to encode the meaning of the words in order to use this strategy.

The deepest level of processing, the one that requires meaningful recoding, is semantic encoding, or paying attention to the words’ meanings. A specific task to encourage semantic encoding might be to judge whether the word makes sense in the following sentence: “The __ fell down the stairs.”

Craik’s research consistently showed that memory was better the deeper the processing. Semantic processing was better than acoustic processing, which was better than visual processing. This is a basic principle of memory that you can start using today to improve your memory: to effectively encode, you should recode information in a way that allows you to process the meaning of what you are trying to remember.

auditory (acoustic) encoding: encoding from working memory into long-term memory by paying attention to the sounds of words only

levels of processing: strategies that affect how well a memory is encoded. Craik and Tulving’s research demonstrates that deeper processing (that is, semantic encoding) leads to better memory than shallower processing (that is, encoding based on auditory and visual properties)

recoding : transforming information to be encoded into a different format

rehearsal: the basic strategy that people use to encode information from working memory into long term memory

semantic encoding: encoding from working memory into long-term memory by paying attention to the meaning of words

How Can You Recode for Meaning?

One main reason that recoding for meaning helps to create solid memories is that it takes advantage of the format of information when it is stored in long-term memory. Try this: Tell a few minutes of the story “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” or any other story you know from your childhood. Did you tell the story word-for-word the way it was told to you? Probably not. But still you remembered the characters and the sequence of events quite well. Typically (but not always), long-term memory stores information by meaning, taking advantage of patterns and creating links between concepts and people and events (Bransford, Barclay, & Franks; 1972; Brewer, 1977). This tendency allows you to recall the general story, but not the precise story, whether it is a children’s fantasy, a description in a textbook, or some event that happens to you. When you make special efforts to encode meaning, you are playing to the natural tendencies and strengths of your long-term memory.

Any way that you can make information meaningful should help make your efforts to remember more successful. Here are some useful strategies that you can use for reading textbooks and remembering lectures and other course material:

Elaborative Verbal rehearsal and Self-Reference

Try elaborative verbal rehearsal, which is basically restating what you have just read or heard in your own words. After reading a short section or paragraph, pretend that a friend has asked you to explain it. Or pretend that you are trying to teach the material to someone. Although this can be difficult to do, the payoff is tremendous. In one study that compared high-performing and low-performing students who were taking General Psychology, the use of elaborative verbal rehearsal was the most important difference (Ratliff-Crain and Klopfleisch, 2005).

Use the  self-reference effect by trying to apply the material to yourself (Forsyth & Wibberly, 1993; Fujita, & Horiuchi, 2004, Jackson et al. 2019). Suppose you were trying to teach some course content to someone else. You might decide to use some real-life examples to help your students understand the material. Well, it turns out that this strategy is extremely powerful for remembering the material yourself. Continually ask yourself, “Can I think of an example of this concept from my own life?” or even simply, “How does this apply to me?” Creating a mental link between the course material and what it means to you is one of the very best ways to encode meaning. With practice, you should be able to use this strategy in many of your courses. The self-reference effect is very robust; it has been demonstrated with children, college students, older adults (with and without mild cognitive impairment), and adults and adolescents with autism (Jackson et al 2019; Lind et al. 2019).

Keep in mind as you consider trying these strategies that they can be hard to do, at least at first. It is certainly harder, and more time consuming, to do elaborative verbal rehearsal than to simply read a textbook chapter once. But it is no more time consuming than re-reading a chapter a few times because you know you will not be able to remember it. Also keep in mind that, as you get better at using the strategies, they grow more effective and get easier to use.

elaborative verbal rehearsal : an encoding technique that encourages semantic processing by restating to-be-remembered information in your own words, as if teaching it to someone else

self-reference effect : an encoding technique that encourages semantic processing by applying to-be-remembered information to yourself

Organize information.

Imagine that you are visiting a city for the first time. You have only a vague idea of where you are and you need to get to the post office. What you need is a map. A map can help you to learn where important things are and can help you figure out how to find them.

That is what the organizational aids in this book are, as well as the chapter outlines (and tables of contents) in other books and even web sitemaps. They are maps. They are useful for helping you effectively transfer information from working memory into long-term memory because they organize that information in a meaningful way.

If you can organize information meaningfully (or take advantage of a meaningful organization provided for you), it will be more effectively encoded into long-term memory (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 1999; Halpern, 1986). The beauty of this strategy from a practical standpoint in school is that often the work is done for you. Someone has already gone to the trouble of coming up with a meaningful organizational scheme. Use the chapter outlines to plot your route through your textbook. Pay attention during the first five minutes of lecture when your professor gives you a preview of the day’s lecture and activities.

Signaling Meaning in Advance

One of the reasons that outlines and previews help you put information into long-term memory is that they alert you in advance to the types of information you’ll be encountering. Sometimes just a little bit of information goes a long way. Even something as simple as knowing the title of reading material before you start reading allows you to organize the information so that it makes sense and can be remembered.

John Bransford and his colleagues demonstrated this kind of effect by asking two groups of research participants to remember a paragraph. For the first group, the paragraph alone was presented. Here is one of their paragraphs. See how well you think you would remember it:

The procedure is actually quite simple. First you arrange things into different groups. Of course, one pile may be sufficient depending on how much there is to do. If you have to go somewhere else due to lack of facilities that is the next step, otherwise you are pretty well set. It is important not to overdo things. That is, it is better to do too few things at once than too many. In the short run, this may not seem important but complications can easily arise. A mistake can be expensive as well. At first the whole procedure will seem complicated. Soon, however, it will become just another facet of life. It is difficult to foresee any end to the necessity of this task in the immediate future, but then one never can tell. After the procedure is completed one arranges the materials into different groups again. Then they can be put into their appropriate places. Eventually they will be used once more and the whole cycle will then have to be repeated. However, that is part of life (from Bransford and Johnson, 1972).

Do you think you would do a good job on a memory test for this paragraph? Bransford and Johnson’s participants did very poorly. Although the individual sentences are meaningful, it is difficult to see how they are related to each other—in other words, how they are organized.

The second group of participants read the same paragraph, but before doing so, they were given the title “Doing the Laundry.” Now that you know the title, go back and read the paragraph again and see if it makes sense. If you are like most of Bransford and Johnson’s participants, providing a title makes the paragraph much easier to understand and remember.

What Bransford and Johnson demonstrated is that the title allows readers to make inferences—that is, to use their background knowledge to tie the paragraph together. For example, in the second sentence, the title allows you to draw the inference that the word “things” refers to “clothes.” Inferences like these relate the formerly meaningless paragraph to the knowledge about the world that you already have. By providing a title, Bransford and Johnson allowed participants to activate their own knowledge about the way the world is organized before they started reading the paragraph. The title gave them preexisting memory hooks on which to hang the new words that they were reading.

Highlighting Relationships

In order for the technique of organizing to encode to work, you have to find the organization meaningful. That is, you have to see the organization as more than simply a list of topics. You need to learn to recognize the typical relationships between concepts. An outline or a table of contents, with items indented different amounts and different formatting for various levels of headings, also shows the relationships among the topics: which concepts can be grouped together, which are more important than others. To a very large degree, organizing information to improve encoding is simply a matter of paying attention to these types of relationships.

One very important relationship is between a general principle and an example of that principle. Look for clues in the text of your book, such as introductory phrases (“for example,” “the main idea is,” and the like). When you have identified whether a given statement is a general principle or an example, try to generate the other. If you think it is the general principle, try to come up with a new example. If you think it is an example, make sure you can identify the general principle.

Here are three other types of relationships you should make a habit of distinguishing in the materials you want to remember:

• Causes and effects.  For example, if we were doing an experiment on violent video games and aggression, the independent variable, exposure to violent video games, is the supposed cause, and the dependent variable, aggressiveness, is the supposed effect (see sec 2.3).
• Parts and wholes.  For example, a neuron is essentially a small part of the brain (the brain is made up of billions of neurons). Neurons themselves are composed of parts, including the cell body, dendrites, and axons (see secs 5.3/11.1).
• Levels of a hierarchy. A hierarchy is an organization system in which lower-level, or subordinate categories are included under higher-level, or superordinate categories. For example, the levels of living things that you probably learned in biology—kingdom, phylum, class, order, etc.—are organized in a hierarchy.

Any organization scheme that you come up with yourself will be particularly effective. Because you find it personally meaningful, a self-generated scheme will be easily and effectively encoded into long-term memory. You would be doing yourself a tremendous favor if you adopted a good strategy for generating these organizational schemes.

• In your own words, why is rephrasing textbook material in your own words an effective strategy for encoding information into long-term memory?
• Why can it be difficult to assemble something using a poorly written instruction manual?
• Try to think of a situation in your life where you were unable to understand or remember something because you did not know how it was organized.
• Why is it difficult to understand or remember a movie for which you missed the first 30 minutes ?

5.3 Memory Encoding and the Brain

What do you think of when you think of “dog”? Diagram your thoughts about “dog” by following these directions:

• On a sheet of paper draw a small circle in the middle of the page and write the word “dog” in the circle.
• Draw a short line out from this first circle and draw another circle at the end of the line; inside the new circle write a word that relates to the word dog(perhaps “tail”).
• Continue to draw lines out from the concept of dog and draw circles into which you write words that are related to dog. Also, draw some lines out from some of the new concepts and add concepts related to them. For example, if you wrote down “tail” you might connect it to a circle with the word “wag.”
• When you are finished writing down new concepts, take a few minutes to draw lines connecting some of the concepts that seem to be related.

The network of interrelated items that you have just created is a  concept map . Yours might look something like this:

A concept map is, among other things, a good way to organize information for encoding into long-term memory. It signals the meanings of a number of related concepts and highlights the relationships among them (remember our discussion in section 5.3?). A concept map is also a simple representation of how networks of concepts are formed in the brain.

Creating Memories in the Brain: Activation and Synaptic Plasticity

You may already know that the brain is made up of billions of cells called  neurons. For now, you can think of the brain as simply a very large collection of neurons. The neurons are all connected to each other in an extraordinarily complex pattern (one neuron can be simultaneously connected to many other neurons, all of which can be connected to many other neurons, and so on down the line). Neurons are connected to each other by axons , which look like single long branches extending from the cell body, which is the round part of the neuron, and by  dendrite s, which are smaller branches splitting off from the cell body. (Each neuron has a single axon but many dendrites.) Electrical and chemical activity that takes place through pathways created by these interconnected neurons determines everything we say, think, feel, or do (see sec 11.1).

The neurons are involved in two significant ways when you encode information:

• Activation . When you encode information and move it into memory, many neurons throughout the brain become active. The neural activity is pulses of electricity that are caused by chemicals called ions (electrically charged particles) briefly changing locations in your brain. The ions (sodium, which is abbreviated Na+) rush into the axon of a neuron. This movement of ions produces a brief electrical charge inside the neuron, which is then transmitted to many other neurons (see Module 11 for details).
• Synaptic plasticity . In order to store information for a long time, the brain has to change its very structure—that is, the neurons themselves must change. Brain researchers currently believe that the change in structure can occur either within the individual neurons or through the connections among the billions of neurons in your brain. The connections are called synapses, hence the name synaptic plasticity. Changes that occur inside the neuron cause the neuron to produce more or fewer of the chemicals that it uses to communicate with other neurons, which are called neurotransmitters (see sec 11.3). The synapses are located at the spaces where the axon of one neuron is situated next to the dendrites of a neighboring neuron. Two things can happen in response to changing levels of neurotransmitters: the axons and dendrites can extend or retract, hence changing, ever so slightly, the structure of your brain; and the surface of the neuron can change by having more or fewer receptive areas for neurotransmitters.  Both of these events are forms of synaptic plasticity and occur whenever new information is encountered.

These two kinds of changes, especially activation, happen extremely quickly. And the changes of synaptic plasticity can last a very long time, perhaps even forever. Think about it: any time you have a new experience your brain immediately changes its electrical activity and changes its structure permanently.

activation : the electrical charging of a neuron, which readies it to communicate with other neurons

axon : the single tube in a neuron that carries an electrical signal away, toward other neurons

dendrite : one of the many branches on a neuron that receive incoming signals

neuron : the basic cell of the nervous system; our brain has billions of neurons

neurotransmitter : chemical that carries a neural signal from one neuron to another

synapse : the area between two adjacent neurons, where neural communication occurs

synaptic plasticity : the brain’s ability to change its structure through tiny changes in the surfaces of neurons or in their ability to produce and release neurotransmitters

Storing Memories Across the Brain: Neural Networks

So far, we have just been thinking about connections between two neurons. Let us return now to the idea that neurons are connected to each other in massive three-dimensional, dynamic, organic versions of the concept map. We call these many interconnected neurons  neural network s. Many neuroscientists believe that most memories are not stored in a specific area of the brain but are spread out in interconnected neural networks across many areas of the brain. In other words, brain activation and synaptic plasticity for memories travel throughout the brain.

This neural network idea offers an explanation for why encoding meaning works so well in forming long-lasting memories. When you start searching through your brain for information—a memory—you will have a greater chance of hitting a unit of that information with a neural network that is spread out and contains a lot of information. A larger, more detailed network that uses lots of neurons will be easier to activate and use than a smaller network.

• Describe in your own words the changes that take place in your brain when you encode new information into long-term memory.
• Draw a concept map that includes the concepts from this module.

Have any of the following ever happened to you?

• You know a fact but can’t come up with it. You have the feeling that it is on the “tip of your tongue.”
• You blank out on a test question. After a mighty struggle to remember, you give up and leave the question unanswered (or you make a wild guess). Then, the correct answer hits you on the way home like a slap in the head.
• You (temporarily) forget the name of someone who you know very well.
• You (temporarily) forget your own phone number.
• Is it true that you always find your keys in the last place you look for them? (Answer: Yes, because most people stop looking after they find what they were looking for.)

It is the day of the big Political Science mid-term. You have been studying for days. You feel as if your head is so full of political facts, principles, and theories that it is going to explode. Your professor walks in and asks if there are any questions before she hands out the exam. “Please,” you silently beg, “hand out the exam now, before I forget everything I studied.” After ten minutes of questions from classmates (that you don’t listen to because you are too nervous), you get your exam. Question #1: How much of the U.S. government’s budget is spent on foreign aid? You know this. You just studied it last night. It is in your head somewhere if you could only find it. Why can’t you remember? You are struggling with retrieval.

Understanding (and Improving) Retrieval

Memory retrieval (withdrawing information from long-term memory for use in working memory) is largely a matter of coming up with and using effective retrieval cues. In familiar terms, retrieval cues are reminders, any information that automatically leads you to remember something. More scientifically, you can think of retrieval cues as entry points into the neural network associated with a particular memory (see sec 5.3).

You might also think of retrieval cues this (decidedly less scientific) way:  Any specific memory you have floating around in your head (the amount of U.S. foreign aid, for example) is slippery. To pull it out of long-term memory and into working memory, you need a hook, something attached to the specific memory that you can grab onto. A retrieval cue is that hook. The very best hooks are ones that you put there yourself during recoding.

To create potential retrieval cues for yourself while you’re studying, you can use the encoding principles we have already described: encode meaning and organize information. The more cues you create through this recoding and the better they are, the better your chances of being able to “grab onto one” when you need it.

Now you might begin to understand why straight repetition is only a mediocre study strategy. To be sure, the repetition of a concept and its definition provide you with a possible retrieval cue. A formerly meaningless term and definition, completely disconnected from the rest of the knowledge in your head, is not the world’s greatest hook, however.

In contrast, consider a retrieval cue that is based on memories from your own life. For example, suppose when trying to encode the concept  procedural memory into your long-term memory, you remembered the time you helped your little sister learn how to tie her shoes. The formerly meaningless concept, procedural memory, now becomes part of your memory for this event.

Importantly, you would probably have a fairly detailed memory of such an event. Any of these details can serve you as a possible retrieval cue. Can you picture the smile on your little sister’s face when she finally got her shoes tied right? That can be your hook. Do you remember the feeling of frustration before she caught on? That can be your hook. And so on. Literally anything you might remember about the event can work to remind you of the concept  procedural memory.

That is the beauty of making the information personally meaningful (remember, it is called the self reference effect). It becomes embedded in a rich network of information that is the easiest stuff in the world for you to remember—information about yourself. The specific hook, or retrieval cue, can be any aspect of the event that you can recall. Add this to the recoding that you did based on organization (for example, attending to the relationship between procedural and declarative memory) and by rephrasing the material in your own words, and you have an extremely powerful set of potential retrieval cues, a set of hooks that give you an excellent chance of being able to grab one when you need it.

memory retrieval : withdrawing information from long-term memory into working memory

retrieval cue : a reminder that leads to the withdrawal of information from long-term memory into working memory

Providing a Match Between Encoding and Retrieval

Sometimes, even extensive encoding is not enough to give you a good retrieval cue when you need it. Or, perhaps, you didn’t do a careful job of encoding. What then? Is there still a way to make retrieval cues work in your favor? Fortunately, the answer is yes.

The general strategy that you use to make retrieval cues available and useful is to try to provide some kind of match between the encoding and retrieval situations. This idea is known as the encoding specificity principle (Tulving & Thomson, 1973). If your physiological state or the external environment (the context) is similar during both encoding and retrieval, you have a better chance of coming up with a retrieval cue (Murnane & Phelps, 1993; Smith, 1979). For example, suppose you drank four cups of coffee, each with an extra shot of espresso, when you were encoding information for a big test. You might consider ingesting a bit of caffeine before retrieval time.

Even seemingly trivial aspects of the external environment, such as your location in a room, can be just the match you need to give you a retrieval cue. But hold on before you decide to wear the same clothes every day to take advantage of the encoding specificity effect.  Think about what we are saying. The encoding specificity effect allows you to remember something in a situation that closely matches the situation at encoding. That might be helpful for an exam, but is that what you really want to accomplish? For example, suppose you are studying to be a nurse. Do you really want to remember some important medical concept ONLY when you are sitting at your desk, wearing your favorite blue shirt, and chewing peppermint flavored gum? We thought not. If you really want to learn something, to be able to retrieve it in many future situations, you would do best to simulate that when you encode it. In other words, engage in multiple encoding episodes, and vary the context in each (Bjork & Bjork 2011). This is hard. In fact, it is one of the list of strategies known as desirable difficulties . These are strategies that are difficult to use and make you feel as if you are not learning, but in reality lead to much more effective (and lasting) learning (Bjork & Bjork 2011; Smith, Glenberg & Bjork, 1978). You might also consider some of the strategies we have recommended previously (e.g., elaborative verbal rehearsal and generating self-references) to be other types of desirable difficulties. As we said previously, they can be hard to use, but they are extremely effective.

Saving the Best for Last: Retrieval Practice (and Spacing)

So, do you think that the principles we have shared so far can help you in your quest to improve your memory? Well, we have terrific news: We have saved some of the best news for last. There is one strategy that may have been first suggested by Aristotle and has been examined in research for over 100 years. Time and again, this strategy has been found to lead to better memory than re-studying material (Brown, Roediger, & McDermott, 2014). And very few students use this strategy (Karpicke, Butler, & Roediger, 2009). OK, have we kept you in enough suspense? Here it is: If you want to be able to retrieve information from memory, one of the most important things you should do is to PRACTICE retrieving that information (sorry for yelling, but this is that important. And not just once. You should practice retrieval over time, spacing out your practice sessions as much as you can. (Soderstrom, Kerr, and Bjork 2016; Karpicke and Roediger, 2008). Many students believe that it is more efficient to do all of their studying at one time, but the spacing effect shows that the very opposite is true.

This is obviously great news because you do not need to recode information or come up with new examples, or struggle with organization to use these strategies. You only need to intentionally practice and organize your time.

Just as a reminder or clarification: we are certainly not saying that you should only practice retrieval with the spacing effect. We are saying that it is the one strategy that may have the largest impact on your ability to remember. So, to summarize, allow us to present a guide to studying that is based on some the best principles of memory that psychologists have to offer.

• Spend some time surveying the material before you start reading it. Figure out how it is organized by reading previews and summaries, and paying attention to outlines.
• Recode for meaning while you read: periodically pause and reflect on what you have just read. Rephrase material and come up with examples from your own life (elaborative verbal rehearsal with self-reference). Note relationships between different concepts. Pay attention to how the current information fits into what you have already learned.
• Practice retrieving while you are reading. During some of your periodic pauses, cover up what you just read. Try to retrieve the definitions of key terms. Try to generate your elaborative verbal rehearsals without looking at the text.
• Practice retrieval after reading. Use practice quizzes, flash cards, quizlet, etc. It is far more effective if you have to come up with the answers yourself rather than just recognizing the answer (like in a multiple-choice question).
• Come up with a schedule that allows you to take advantage of the spacing effect.

desirable difficulties : strategies that are difficult to use and make you feel as if you are not learning, but lead to much more effective and lasting learning

spacing effect : the finding that information that is learned and practiced over a period of time (instead of all at once) is remembered better

• Try to remember a time that you had a temporary retrieval failure. What retrieval cue eventually helped you to remember?
• What specific types of retrieval cues do you think work best for you?
• Do you have any memories in which you see yourself in the third person, as if you were watching yourself on television? Doesn’t that seem odd, considering the fact that you never experience yourself that way?
• Have you ever had an argument with someone about an event that happened in which the main point of disagreement is that the two of you remember the event differently? Were you both sure that you were right?

College student Charles was always proud of his memory. In school, he rarely took notes and often had to read a chapter a single time only in order to remember it well enough to get a good grade on an exam. He also had many detailed autobiographical memories, several dating back to when he was a very small child. For example, he remembered his mother coming home from the hospital when his brother was born; he was two years, four months old. Or he remembered an early haircut, perhaps his first visit to the barber. He was sitting in the barber’s chair, eating a lollipop (covered with hair, no doubt), while his whole family stood around and watched.

One evening during Charles’s sophomore year, he and his family decided to watch some old videos from the family to celebrate his parents’ anniversary. Then, suddenly, Charles saw his memory on the television screen. It was his first haircut. His parents had obviously wanted to remember the event for the rest of their lives, so they decided to capture it on film. There in the family room Charles saw his entire memory played out on the screen, and he realized that he did not, in fact, have a memory of his first haircut. He had a memory of the home movie of his first haircut and had mistakenly believed that it was a memory of the actual event. Charles also knew this because he had just learned this concept in his psychology class. Forgetting the actual source of a memory is very common; it is called  source misattribution (Schacter, 2001). It is one form of memory distortion.

The early sections of this module emphasized how employing good encoding and retrieval skills can lead you to remember information more effectively. Somewhat hidden in those discussions, however, is an important observation about the way memory works. Although it is fair to accept the existence of different memory systems, such as working memory and long-term memory, it is not fair to assume that information gets copied into these systems perfectly, to be replayed accurately and in its entirety every time the correct retrieval cue is accessed. Memory, it turns out, is much more dynamic than that.

Instead of thinking of memory as something to be recorded and played back, it is more accurate to say you construct memories of events as you go along. The idea of  memory construction might be hard to accept at first, but it is the simplest way to explain how memories for events change over time. Not only do some of the details of memories fade (as you might realize), but new details also creep into them. For example, imagine that someone tells you a very unusual story that does not make a great deal of sense to you. The story is from a non-Western culture and is quite difficult for you to follow (assuming you are from a Western culture, of course). Over time, as you attempt to recall this story, it will begin to resemble stories that are more familiar to you, with many of the cultural idiosyncrasies forgotten and replaced by themes and details more typical of Western culture (see Window 2).

A number of factors may render a memory incomplete or inaccurate. The kind and amount of processing that takes place at encoding can have a huge impact on the contents of an eventual memory. Also, minor distortions that are consistent with one’s view of the world often creep in. Imagine that you are visiting your psychology professor’s office for the first time. After leaving, you are asked to report what was in the office. Most people have beliefs about what sorts of objects would be in a professor’s office (such as desk, telephone, books), and they would be likely to think they remembered seeing these objects even if they were not actually in the professor’s office. Nearly one-third of the participants in a study similar to the situation just described reported seeing books in a professor’s office—even though the office had been specifically set up without books to test if participants would falsely remember them (Brewer & Treyens 1981).

Elizabeth Loftus and her colleagues have pioneered research on the  misinformation effect , perhaps the most dramatic demonstration of the way that memory can be distorted. Loftus’s research has demonstrated that information given to people after an event occurs, even at retrieval, can lead to memory distortions. For example, research participants who had been shown a slide show of a car accident were later misled to believe that a stop sign was pictured in one of the slides. Many of these participants on a subsequent memory test mistakenly reported that they had seen the stop sign (Loftus, Miller, and Burns, 1978).

In another experiment, research participants were asked one of two questions after viewing a videotape of an accident between two cars. In one condition, they were asked, “How fast were the cars going when they hit each other?” In the other condition, participants were asked, “How fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?” One week later, participants who had been asked the “smashed” version of the question were more likely to report seeing broken glass in the video (Loftus, Schooler, and Wagenaar, 1985).

The misinformation effect has been demonstrated many times, even leading participants to remember events that did not occur at all, such as spilling a punch bowl or being lost in a mall as a child (Hyman and Pentland, 1996; Loftus and Pickrell, 1995).

• memory construction : the process of building up a recollection of an event, rather than “playing” a memory, as if it were a recording
• misinformation effect : a memory distortion that results when misleading information is presented to people after an event has occurred
• source misattribution : a memory distortion in which a person misremembers the actual source of a memory
• Can you think of a memory from your life that you would be willing to admit might be a memory distortion?

putting information into memory systems

taking information out of memory systems

keeping memories in the brain for future use

a short-term memory storage system that holds information in consciousness for immediate use or to transfer it into long long-term memory

an essentially unlimited, nearly permanent memory storage system

a unit of meaningful information

a very short (about one second), extremely accurate memory system that holds information long enough for an individual to pay attention to it

memory for skills and procedures

memory for facts and episodes

the part of declarative memory that refers to one’s general store of knowledge

the part of declarative memory that refers to specific events or episodes from someone’s life

an encoding technique that encourages semantic processing by restating to-be-remembered information in your own words, as if teaching it to someone else

an encoding technique that encourages semantic processing by applying to-be-remembered information to yourself

a pictorial representation of the relationships between a set of related concepts

the single tube in a neuron that carries an electrical signal away, toward other neurons

one of the many branches on a neuron that receive incoming signals

the electrical charging of a neuron, which readies it to communicate with other neurons

the brain’s ability to change its structure through tiny changes in the surfaces of neurons or in their ability to produce and release neurotransmitters

the basic cell of the nervous system; our brain has billions of neurons

chemical that carries a neural signal from one neuron to another

the area between two adjacent neurons, where neural communication occurs

interconnected group of neurons

withdrawing information from long-term memory into working memory

a reminder that leads to the withdrawal of information from long-term memory into working memory

strategies that are difficult to use and make you feel as if you are not learning, but lead to much more effective and lasting learning

the finding that information that is learned and practiced over a period of time (instead of all at once) is remembered better

a memory distortion in which a person misremembers the actual source of a memory

the process of building up a recollection of an event, rather than “playing” a memory, as if it were a recording

a memory distortion that results when misleading information is presented to people after an event has occurred

Introduction to Psychology Copyright © 2020 by Ken Gray; Elizabeth Arnott-Hill; and Or'Shaundra Benson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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8.1 Memories as Types and Stages

Learning objectives.

• Compare and contrast explicit and implicit memory, identifying the features that define each.
• Explain the function and duration of eidetic and echoic memories.
• Summarize the capacities of short-term memory and explain how working memory is used to process information in it.

As you can see in Table 8.1 “Memory Conceptualized in Terms of Types, Stages, and Processes” , psychologists conceptualize memory in terms of types , in terms of stages , and in terms of processes . In this section we will consider the two types of memory, explicit memory and implicit memory , and then the three major memory stages: sensory , short-term , and long-term (Atkinson & Shiffrin, 1968). Then, in the next section, we will consider the nature of long-term memory, with a particular emphasis on the cognitive techniques we can use to improve our memories. Our discussion will focus on the three processes that are central to long-term memory: encoding , storage , and retrieval .

Table 8.1 Memory Conceptualized in Terms of Types, Stages, and Processes

Explicit Memory

When we assess memory by asking a person to consciously remember things, we are measuring explicit memory . Explicit memory refers to knowledge or experiences that can be consciously remembered . As you can see in Figure 8.2 “Types of Memory” , there are two types of explicit memory: episodic and semantic . Episodic memory refers to the firsthand experiences that we have had (e.g., recollections of our high school graduation day or of the fantastic dinner we had in New York last year). Semantic memory refers to our knowledge of facts and concepts about the world (e.g., that the absolute value of −90 is greater than the absolute value of 9 and that one definition of the word “affect” is “the experience of feeling or emotion”).

Figure 8.2 Types of Memory

Explicit memory is assessed using measures in which the individual being tested must consciously attempt to remember the information. A recall memory test is a measure of explicit memory that involves bringing from memory information that has previously been remembered . We rely on our recall memory when we take an essay test, because the test requires us to generate previously remembered information. A multiple-choice test is an example of a recognition memory test , a measure of explicit memory that involves determining whether information has been seen or learned before .

Your own experiences taking tests will probably lead you to agree with the scientific research finding that recall is more difficult than recognition. Recall, such as required on essay tests, involves two steps: first generating an answer and then determining whether it seems to be the correct one. Recognition, as on multiple-choice test, only involves determining which item from a list seems most correct (Haist, Shimamura, & Squire, 1992). Although they involve different processes, recall and recognition memory measures tend to be correlated. Students who do better on a multiple-choice exam will also, by and large, do better on an essay exam (Bridgeman & Morgan, 1996).

A third way of measuring memory is known as relearning (Nelson, 1985). Measures of relearning (or savings) assess how much more quickly information is processed or learned when it is studied again after it has already been learned but then forgotten . If you have taken some French courses in the past, for instance, you might have forgotten most of the vocabulary you learned. But if you were to work on your French again, you’d learn the vocabulary much faster the second time around. Relearning can be a more sensitive measure of memory than either recall or recognition because it allows assessing memory in terms of “how much” or “how fast” rather than simply “correct” versus “incorrect” responses. Relearning also allows us to measure memory for procedures like driving a car or playing a piano piece, as well as memory for facts and figures.

Implicit Memory

While explicit memory consists of the things that we can consciously report that we know, implicit memory refers to knowledge that we cannot consciously access. However, implicit memory is nevertheless exceedingly important to us because it has a direct effect on our behavior. Implicit memory refers to the influence of experience on behavior, even if the individual is not aware of those influences . As you can see in Figure 8.2 “Types of Memory” , there are three general types of implicit memory: procedural memory, classical conditioning effects, and priming.

Procedural memory refers to our often unexplainable knowledge of how to do things . When we walk from one place to another, speak to another person in English, dial a cell phone, or play a video game, we are using procedural memory. Procedural memory allows us to perform complex tasks, even though we may not be able to explain to others how we do them. There is no way to tell someone how to ride a bicycle; a person has to learn by doing it. The idea of implicit memory helps explain how infants are able to learn. The ability to crawl, walk, and talk are procedures, and these skills are easily and efficiently developed while we are children despite the fact that as adults we have no conscious memory of having learned them.

A second type of implicit memory is classical conditioning effects, in which we learn, often without effort or awareness, to associate neutral stimuli (such as a sound or a light) with another stimulus (such as food), which creates a naturally occurring response, such as enjoyment or salivation. The memory for the association is demonstrated when the conditioned stimulus (the sound) begins to create the same response as the unconditioned stimulus (the food) did before the learning.

The final type of implicit memory is known as priming , or changes in behavior as a result of experiences that have happened frequently or recently . Priming refers both to the activation of knowledge (e.g., we can prime the concept of “kindness” by presenting people with words related to kindness) and to the influence of that activation on behavior (people who are primed with the concept of kindness may act more kindly).

One measure of the influence of priming on implicit memory is the word fragment test , in which a person is asked to fill in missing letters to make words. You can try this yourself: First, try to complete the following word fragments, but work on each one for only three or four seconds. Do any words pop into mind quickly?

_ i b _ a _ y

_ h _ s _ _ i _ n

_ h _ i s _

Now read the following sentence carefully:

Then try again to make words out of the word fragments.

I think you might find that it is easier to complete fragments 1 and 3 as “library” and “book,” respectively, after you read the sentence than it was before you read it. However, reading the sentence didn’t really help you to complete fragments 2 and 4 as “physician” and “chaise.” This difference in implicit memory probably occurred because as you read the sentence, the concept of “library” (and perhaps “book”) was primed, even though they were never mentioned explicitly. Once a concept is primed it influences our behaviors, for instance, on word fragment tests.

Our everyday behaviors are influenced by priming in a wide variety of situations. Seeing an advertisement for cigarettes may make us start smoking, seeing the flag of our home country may arouse our patriotism, and seeing a student from a rival school may arouse our competitive spirit. And these influences on our behaviors may occur without our being aware of them.

Research Focus: Priming Outside Awareness Influences Behavior

One of the most important characteristics of implicit memories is that they are frequently formed and used automatically , without much effort or awareness on our part. In one demonstration of the automaticity and influence of priming effects, John Bargh and his colleagues (Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996) conducted a study in which they showed college students lists of five scrambled words, each of which they were to make into a sentence. Furthermore, for half of the research participants, the words were related to stereotypes of the elderly. These participants saw words such as the following:

The other half of the research participants also made sentences, but from words that had nothing to do with elderly stereotypes. The purpose of this task was to prime stereotypes of elderly people in memory for some of the participants but not for others.

The experimenters then assessed whether the priming of elderly stereotypes would have any effect on the students’ behavior—and indeed it did. When the research participant had gathered all of his or her belongings, thinking that the experiment was over, the experimenter thanked him or her for participating and gave directions to the closest elevator. Then, without the participants knowing it, the experimenters recorded the amount of time that the participant spent walking from the doorway of the experimental room toward the elevator. As you can see in Figure 8.3 “Results From Bargh, Chen, and Burrows, 1996” , participants who had made sentences using words related to elderly stereotypes took on the behaviors of the elderly—they walked significantly more slowly as they left the experimental room.

Figure 8.3 Results From Bargh, Chen, and Burrows, 1996

Bargh, Chen, and Burrows (1996) found that priming words associated with the elderly made people walk more slowly.

Adapted from Bargh, J. A., Chen, M., & Burrows, L. (1996). Automaticity of social behavior: Direct effects of trait construct and stereotype activation on action. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 71 , 230–244.

To determine if these priming effects occurred out of the awareness of the participants, Bargh and his colleagues asked still another group of students to complete the priming task and then to indicate whether they thought the words they had used to make the sentences had any relationship to each other, or could possibly have influenced their behavior in any way. These students had no awareness of the possibility that the words might have been related to the elderly or could have influenced their behavior.

Stages of Memory: Sensory, Short-Term, and Long-Term Memory

Another way of understanding memory is to think about it in terms of stages that describe the length of time that information remains available to us. According to this approach (see Figure 8.4 “Memory Duration” ), information begins in sensory memory , moves to short-term memory , and eventually moves to long-term memory . But not all information makes it through all three stages; most of it is forgotten. Whether the information moves from shorter-duration memory into longer-duration memory or whether it is lost from memory entirely depends on how the information is attended to and processed.

Figure 8.4 Memory Duration

Memory can characterized in terms of stages—the length of time that information remains available to us.

Adapted from Atkinson, R. C., & Shiffrin, R. M. (1968). Human memory: A proposed system and its control processes. In K. Spence (Ed.), The psychology of learning and motivation (Vol. 2). Oxford, England: Academic Press.

Sensory Memory

Sensory memory refers to the brief storage of sensory information . Sensory memory is a memory buffer that lasts only very briefly and then, unless it is attended to and passed on for more processing, is forgotten. The purpose of sensory memory is to give the brain some time to process the incoming sensations, and to allow us to see the world as an unbroken stream of events rather than as individual pieces.

Visual sensory memory is known as iconic memory . Iconic memory was first studied by the psychologist George Sperling (1960). In his research, Sperling showed participants a display of letters in rows, similar to that shown in Figure 8.5 “Measuring Iconic Memory” . However, the display lasted only about 50 milliseconds (1/20 of a second). Then, Sperling gave his participants a recall test in which they were asked to name all the letters that they could remember. On average, the participants could remember only about one-quarter of the letters that they had seen.

Figure 8.5 Measuring Iconic Memory

Sperling (1960) showed his participants displays such as this one for only 1/20th of a second. He found that when he cued the participants to report one of the three rows of letters, they could do it, even if the cue was given shortly after the display had been removed. The research demonstrated the existence of iconic memory.

Adapted from Sperling, G. (1960). The information available in brief visual presentation. Psychological Monographs, 74 (11), 1–29.

Sperling reasoned that the participants had seen all the letters but could remember them only very briefly, making it impossible for them to report them all. To test this idea, in his next experiment he first showed the same letters, but then after the display had been removed , he signaled to the participants to report the letters from either the first, second, or third row. In this condition, the participants now reported almost all the letters in that row. This finding confirmed Sperling’s hunch: Participants had access to all of the letters in their iconic memories, and if the task was short enough, they were able to report on the part of the display he asked them to. The “short enough” is the length of iconic memory, which turns out to be about 250 milliseconds (¼ of a second).

Auditory sensory memory is known as echoic memory . In contrast to iconic memories, which decay very rapidly, echoic memories can last as long as 4 seconds (Cowan, Lichty, & Grove, 1990). This is convenient as it allows you—among other things—to remember the words that you said at the beginning of a long sentence when you get to the end of it, and to take notes on your psychology professor’s most recent statement even after he or she has finished saying it.

In some people iconic memory seems to last longer, a phenomenon known as eidetic imagery (or “photographic memory”) in which people can report details of an image over long periods of time. These people, who often suffer from psychological disorders such as autism, claim that they can “see” an image long after it has been presented, and can often report accurately on that image. There is also some evidence for eidetic memories in hearing; some people report that their echoic memories persist for unusually long periods of time. The composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart may have possessed eidetic memory for music, because even when he was very young and had not yet had a great deal of musical training, he could listen to long compositions and then play them back almost perfectly (Solomon, 1995).

Short-Term Memory

Most of the information that gets into sensory memory is forgotten, but information that we turn our attention to, with the goal of remembering it, may pass into short-term memory . Short-term memory (STM) is the place where small amounts of information can be temporarily kept for more than a few seconds but usually for less than one minute (Baddeley, Vallar, & Shallice, 1990). Information in short-term memory is not stored permanently but rather becomes available for us to process, and the processes that we use to make sense of, modify, interpret, and store information in STM are known as working memory .

Although it is called “memory,” working memory is not a store of memory like STM but rather a set of memory procedures or operations. Imagine, for instance, that you are asked to participate in a task such as this one, which is a measure of working memory (Unsworth & Engle, 2007). Each of the following questions appears individually on a computer screen and then disappears after you answer the question:

Is 10 × 2 − 5 = 15? (Answer YES OR NO) Then remember “S”

Is 12 ÷ 6 − 2 = 1? (Answer YES OR NO) Then remember “R”

Is 10 × 2 = 5? (Answer YES OR NO) Then remember “P”

Is 8 ÷ 2 − 1 = 1? (Answer YES OR NO) Then remember “T”

Is 6 × 2 − 1 = 8? (Answer YES OR NO) Then remember “U”

Is 2 × 3 − 3 = 0? (Answer YES OR NO) Then remember “Q”

To successfully accomplish the task, you have to answer each of the math problems correctly and at the same time remember the letter that follows the task. Then, after the six questions, you must list the letters that appeared in each of the trials in the correct order (in this case S, R, P, T, U, Q).

To accomplish this difficult task you need to use a variety of skills. You clearly need to use STM, as you must keep the letters in storage until you are asked to list them. But you also need a way to make the best use of your available attention and processing. For instance, you might decide to use a strategy of “repeat the letters twice, then quickly solve the next problem, and then repeat the letters twice again including the new one.” Keeping this strategy (or others like it) going is the role of working memory’s central executive —the part of working memory that directs attention and processing. The central executive will make use of whatever strategies seem to be best for the given task. For instance, the central executive will direct the rehearsal process, and at the same time direct the visual cortex to form an image of the list of letters in memory. You can see that although STM is involved, the processes that we use to operate on the material in memory are also critical.

Short-term memory is limited in both the length and the amount of information it can hold. Peterson and Peterson (1959) found that when people were asked to remember a list of three-letter strings and then were immediately asked to perform a distracting task (counting backward by threes), the material was quickly forgotten (see Figure 8.6 “STM Decay” ), such that by 18 seconds it was virtually gone.

Figure 8.6 STM Decay

Peterson and Peterson (1959) found that information that was not rehearsed decayed quickly from memory.

Adapted from Peterson, L., & Peterson, M. J. (1959). Short-term retention of individual verbal items. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 58 (3), 193–198.

One way to prevent the decay of information from short-term memory is to use working memory to rehearse it. Maintenance rehearsal is the process of repeating information mentally or out loud with the goal of keeping it in memory . We engage in maintenance rehearsal to keep a something that we want to remember (e.g., a person’s name, e-mail address, or phone number) in mind long enough to write it down, use it, or potentially transfer it to long-term memory.

If we continue to rehearse information it will stay in STM until we stop rehearsing it, but there is also a capacity limit to STM. Try reading each of the following rows of numbers, one row at a time, at a rate of about one number each second. Then when you have finished each row, close your eyes and write down as many of the numbers as you can remember.

If you are like the average person, you will have found that on this test of working memory, known as a digit span test , you did pretty well up to about the fourth line, and then you started having trouble. I bet you missed some of the numbers in the last three rows, and did pretty poorly on the last one.

The digit span of most adults is between five and nine digits, with an average of about seven. The cognitive psychologist George Miller (1956) referred to “seven plus or minus two” pieces of information as the “magic number” in short-term memory. But if we can only hold a maximum of about nine digits in short-term memory, then how can we remember larger amounts of information than this? For instance, how can we ever remember a 10-digit phone number long enough to dial it?

One way we are able to expand our ability to remember things in STM is by using a memory technique called chunking . Chunking is the process of organizing information into smaller groupings (chunks), thereby increasing the number of items that can be held in STM . For instance, try to remember this string of 12 letters:

You probably won’t do that well because the number of letters is more than the magic number of seven.

Now try again with this one:

Would it help you if I pointed out that the material in this string could be chunked into four sets of three letters each? I think it would, because then rather than remembering 12 letters, you would only have to remember the names of four television stations. In this case, chunking changes the number of items you have to remember from 12 to only four.

Experts rely on chunking to help them process complex information. Herbert Simon and William Chase (1973) showed chess masters and chess novices various positions of pieces on a chessboard for a few seconds each. The experts did a lot better than the novices in remembering the positions because they were able to see the “big picture.” They didn’t have to remember the position of each of the pieces individually, but chunked the pieces into several larger layouts. But when the researchers showed both groups random chess positions—positions that would be very unlikely to occur in real games—both groups did equally poorly, because in this situation the experts lost their ability to organize the layouts (see Figure 8.7 “Possible and Impossible Chess Positions” ). The same occurs for basketball. Basketball players recall actual basketball positions much better than do nonplayers, but only when the positions make sense in terms of what is happening on the court, or what is likely to happen in the near future, and thus can be chunked into bigger units (Didierjean & Marmèche, 2005).

Figure 8.7 Possible and Impossible Chess Positions

Experience matters: Experienced chess players are able to recall the positions of the game on the right much better than are those who are chess novices. But the experts do no better than the novices in remembering the positions on the left, which cannot occur in a real game.

If information makes it past short term-memory it may enter long-term memory (LTM) , memory storage that can hold information for days, months, and years . The capacity of long-term memory is large, and there is no known limit to what we can remember (Wang, Liu, & Wang, 2003). Although we may forget at least some information after we learn it, other things will stay with us forever. In the next section we will discuss the principles of long-term memory.

Key Takeaways

• Memory refers to the ability to store and retrieve information over time.
• For some things our memory is very good, but our active cognitive processing of information assures that memory is never an exact replica of what we have experienced.
• Explicit memory refers to experiences that can be intentionally and consciously remembered, and it is measured using recall, recognition, and relearning. Explicit memory includes episodic and semantic memories.
• Measures of relearning (also known as savings) assess how much more quickly information is learned when it is studied again after it has already been learned but then forgotten.
• Implicit memory refers to the influence of experience on behavior, even if the individual is not aware of those influences. The three types of implicit memory are procedural memory, classical conditioning, and priming.
• Information processing begins in sensory memory, moves to short-term memory, and eventually moves to long-term memory.
• Maintenance rehearsal and chunking are used to keep information in short-term memory.
• The capacity of long-term memory is large, and there is no known limit to what we can remember.

Exercises and Critical Thinking

• List some situations in which sensory memory is useful for you. What do you think your experience of the stimuli would be like if you had no sensory memory?
• Describe a situation in which you need to use working memory to perform a task or solve a problem. How do your working memory skills help you?

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Baddeley, A. D., Vallar, G., & Shallice, T. (1990). The development of the concept of working memory: Implications and contributions of neuropsychology. In G. Vallar & T. Shallice (Eds.), Neuropsychological impairments of short-term memory (pp. 54–73). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Bargh, J. A., Chen, M., & Burrows, L. (1996). Automaticity of social behavior: Direct effects of trait construct and stereotype activation on action. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 71 , 230–244.

Bridgeman, B., & Morgan, R. (1996). Success in college for students with discrepancies between performance on multiple-choice and essay tests. Journal of Educational Psychology, 88 (2), 333–340.

Cowan, N., Lichty, W., & Grove, T. R. (1990). Properties of memory for unattended spoken syllables. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 16 (2), 258–268.

Didierjean, A., & Marmèche, E. (2005). Anticipatory representation of visual basketball scenes by novice and expert players. Visual Cognition, 12 (2), 265–283.

Haist, F., Shimamura, A. P., & Squire, L. R. (1992). On the relationship between recall and recognition memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 18 (4), 691–702.

Miller, G. A. (1956). The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review, 63 (2), 81–97.

Nelson, T. O. (1985). Ebbinghaus’s contribution to the measurement of retention: Savings during relearning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 11 (3), 472–478.

Peterson, L., & Peterson, M. J. (1959). Short-term retention of individual verbal items. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 58 (3), 193–198.

Simon, H. A., & Chase, W. G. (1973). Skill in chess. American Scientist, 61 (4), 394–403.

Solomon, M. (1995). Mozart: A life . New York, NY: Harper Perennial.

Sperling, G. (1960). The information available in brief visual presentation. Psychological Monographs, 74 (11), 1–29.

Unsworth, N., & Engle, R. W. (2007). On the division of short-term and working memory: An examination of simple and complex span and their relation to higher order abilities. Psychological Bulletin, 133 (6), 1038–1066.

Wang, Y., Liu, D., & Wang, Y. (2003). Discovering the capacity of human memory. Brain & Mind, 4 (2), 189–198.

Introduction to Psychology Copyright © 2015 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Memory: Understanding Consciousness Essay

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Memory is regarded as the most complex phenomenon in the natural world of living organisms. It has been scientifically established that all organisms have very complex mental processes which help them interact with their respective environments (Schacter, 2002). Most researchers have been more concerned with understanding the concept of memory in human beings.

The human brain is adapted and reorganized by the day to day experiences. Continued interactions with the physical world through the sensory experiences, perceptions, and actions play a central role in shaping and changing the state of the brain (Thompson & Madigan, 2007).

These experiences will later determine what an individual would be able to recall, perceive, comprehend, and become. The essay seeks to discuss memory in terms of the processes occurring in the brain as far as memory is concerned. It will then analyze one of the existing models of memory as well as discuss some ways of enhancing memory.

Researchers have made attempts to provide a comprehensive definition of the complex term of memory. Psychologists have defined memory in human beings as the ability to store, be able to retain for sometime, and recall the stored information, depending on individual’s experiences (Kandel & Squire, 2006).

Memory has also been investigated long time ago by the philosophy investigators. Towards the end of the 19 th century and the beginning of the 20 th century saw the rise in research into memory under cognitive psychology. Modern studies into memory are mainly conducted under cognitive neuroscience which is an inter-link between neuroscience and cognitive psychology. Most of these researchers are also interested in understanding the relationship between memory and the mind.

The information that is received from the environment can be classified into three main stages in storing and recalling the information. First, there is the registration otherwise known as encoding of information. It involves the reception, processing and the synthesis of the information received (Thompson & Madigan, 2007). The second stage involves the total retention of the encoded information. The last stage is the recollection or retrieval of stored information through bringing them back to conscience.

Information storage process has three major levels relative to the time that has elapsed after the perception of some phenomena (Schacter, 2002). The first category of memory is the sensory memory which includes all information received within about 200 or 500 milliseconds after the perception of a given item. It involves to ability to recall most if not all the details of an item after being exposed to. The display cannot last longer than 100 milliseconds. Sensory memory cannot allow pro-longed rehearsal.

The second process of recollection is the short-term memory whose recall duration is several seconds to about a minute without necessarily rehearsing. This memory has considerably small capacity that can hold limited information (Schacter, 2002). It can store up to about 5 or 9 items. Modern researchers estimate the capacity of the short-term memory at even lower levels of between 4 and 5 items. However, the capacity of the memory can always be enhanced through the chunking process.

It is a process of grouping information data into smaller groups with a pattern that is easier to follow. Most psychological researchers have established that acoustic coding is most convenient way of storing information compared to the visual coding. Research findings reveal that it is much difficult to recall vast amount of information with acoustic similarity. The ability to recall, however, depends greatly on individuals’ capabilities.

The third level of information storage is the long-term memory. In the first two cases, information available for recollection is available for a limited period of time implying that the information is not indefinitely available (Thompson & Madigan, 2007). On the contrary, long-term memory can retain numerous quantities of information for a considerably longer period of time. It can even be for a life time.

This is mostly due to its nearly infinite capacity. For instance, one may recall a ten digit number within some short period of time then forget implying that it had been stored in the short-term memory. However, we can recall the same number for a number of years through constant rehearsal; this implies that the information has been stored in the long-term memory. The most distinguishing characteristic between long-term and short-term memories is the system of encoding.

It has been found that whereas short-term memory encodes data acoustically, the long-term memory, on the other hand encodes information semantically. Researchers hold that it is more difficult to recall information with similar meanings, for instance, words with similar definitions like large, huge, big, and great.

In their quest to understand the complexity of the concept of memory, scientists have developed models of memory. These models provide representations that are always abstract with an aim of depicting how the memory operates (Thompson & Madigan, 2007). One of them is the working memory model which focuses on the short-term memory and the active components.

According Baddeley and Hitch, the proponents of this model, the working memory model has three stores: the central executive, the phonological loop, and the visuo-spatial sketchpad (Thompson & Madigan, 2007).

The central executive has been regarded as acting as attention. All information is channeled from this store to three other components: these are the phonological loop, the visuo-spatial sketchpad as well as the episodic buffer which was incorporated into this model in the year 2000 (Kandel & Squire, 2006). Auditory information is stored in the phonological loop through silent rehearsal of words or sounds in clear continuous loop.

On the other hand, visuo-spatial sketchpad is modeled to store spatial as well as visual information. This component is used when dealing with spatial undertakings like distance estimation or the visual tasks like counting floors of tall buildings or image imagination (Thompson & Madigan, 2007).

Furthermore, episodic buffer concentrates on integrating information from all the other components. This can best be illustrated by the ability to call the flow of a movie or a given story in a chronological order. This component process is mostly linked to the long-term memory as well as the semantic meaning of given information.

Some methods of enhancing the memory have been proposed. Psychologists have proposed some reliable techniques of improving memory (Schacter, 2002). These include the incorporation of memory tasks into the day to day practices which include; strive to reduce stress, use of mnemonics, and maintaining a healthy body. The principles used in mnemonics include; imagination, association and location.

The essay has elaborated the concept of memory, particularly as used in psychology. The working memory model has been discussed as an attempt by psychologists to explain how memory operates. Some of the methods that can be used to improve memory ability have been mentioned.

Kandel, E. R. & Squire L. R. (2006). The journals of gerontology and memory:

Psychological sciences and social sciences. Gerontological Society of America. 30 (12) 231-78

Schacter, D. L. (2002). The memory facts: how the mind forgets and remembers. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Thompson, R. F. & Madigan, S. A. (2007). Memory: Understanding consciousness . Princeton University Press.

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Memory: An Extended Definition

Gregorio zlotnik.

1 Clinique de la Migraine de Montreal, Montreal, QC, Canada

Aaron Vansintjan

2 Department of Film, Media and Cultural Studies, Birkbeck, University of London, London, United Kingdom

Recent developments in science and technology point to the need to unify, and extend, the definition of memory. On the one hand, molecular neurobiology has shown that memory is largely a neuro-chemical process, which includes conditioning and any form of stored experience. On the other hand, information technology has led many to claim that cognition is also extended, that is, memory may be stored outside of the brain. In this paper, we review these advances and describe an extended definition of memory. This definition is largely accepted in neuroscience but not explicitly stated. In the extended definition, memory is the capacity to store and retrieve information. Does this new definition of memory mean that everything is now a form of memory? We stress that memory still requires incorporation, that is, in corpore . It is a relationship – where one biological or chemical process is incorporated into another, and changes both in a permanent way. Looking at natural and biological processes of incorporation can help us think of how incorporation of internal and external memory occurs in cognition. We further argue that, if we accept that there is such a thing as the storage of information outside the brain – and that this organic, dynamic process can also be called “memory” – then we open the door to a very different world. The mind is not static. The brain, and the memory it uses, is a work in progress; we are not now who we were then.

Introduction

In the short story “Funes, the memorious,” Jorge Luis Borges invites us to imagine a man, Funes, who cannot forget anything. The narrator is ashamed in the inexactness of his retelling: his own memory is “remote and weak,” in comparison to that of his subject, which resembles “a stammering greatness.” Unlike Funes, he says, “we all live by leaving behind” – life is impossible without forgetting. He goes on to note that, even though Funes could remember every split second, he couldn’t classify or abstract from his memories. “To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract.” The reader may be led to wonder how Funes’ brain has the capacity to store all of that memory. doesn’t it reach its limits at some point? Borges leaves that question to our imagination.

In popular culture, memory is often thought of as some kind of physical thing that is stored in the brain; a subjective, personal experience that we can recall at will. This way of thinking about memory has led many to wonder if there is a maximum amount of memories we can have. But, this idea of memory is at odds with advances in the science of memory over the last century: memory isn’t really a fixed thing stored in the brain, but is more of a chemical process between neurons, which is not static. What’s more, advances in information technology are pushing our understanding of memory into new directions. We now talk about memory on a hard drive, or as a chemical change between neurons. Yet, these different definitions of memory continue to co-exist. A more narrow definition of memory, as the storage of experiences in the brain, is increasingly at odds with an extended definition, which acknowledges these advances. However, while this expanded definition is often implicitly used, it is rarely explicitly acknowledged or stated. Today, the question is no longer, how many memories can we possibly have, but, how is the vast amount of memory we process on a daily basis integrated into cognition?

In this paper, we outline these advances and the currently accepted definitions of memory, arguing that these necessarily imply that we should today adopt an extended definition. In the following, we first describe some key advances in the science of memory, cognitive theory, and information technology. These suggest to us that we are already using a unified, and extended, definition of memory, but rarely made explicit. Does this new definition of memory mean that everything is now a form of memory? We argue that looking at natural and biological processes of incorporation can help us think of how incorporation of internal and external memory occurs in cognition. Finally, we note some of the implications of this extended definition of memory.

Background: Advances in the Science of Memory

Already in the 19th century, the recognition that the number of neurons in the brain doesn’t increase significantly after reaching adulthood suggested to early neuroanatomists that memories aren’t primarily stored through the creation of neurons, but rather through the strengthening of connections between neurons ( Ramón y Cajal, 1894 ). In 1966, the breakthrough discovery of long-term potentiation (LTP) suggested that memories may be encoded in the strength of synaptic signals between neurons ( Bliss and Lømo, 1973 ). And so we started understanding memory as a neuro-chemical process. The studies by Eric Kandel of the Aplysia californica , for which he won the Nobel prize, for example, show that classical conditioning is a basic form of memory storage and is observable on a molecular level within simple organisms ( Kandel et al., 2012 ). This in effect expanded the definition of memory to include storage of information in the neural networks of simple lifeforms. Increasingly, researchers are exploring the chemistry behind memory development and recall, suggesting these molecular processes can lead to psychological adaptations (e.g., Coderre et al., 2003 ; Laferrière et al., 2011 ).

Memory is today defined in psychology as the faculty of encoding, storing, and retrieving information ( Squire, 2009 ). Psychologists have found that memory includes three important categories: sensory, short-term, and long-term. Each of these kinds of memory have different attributes, for example, sensory memory is not consciously controlled, short-term memory can only hold limited information, and long-term memory can store an indefinite amount of information.

Key to the emerging science of memory is the question of how memory is consolidated and processed. Long-term storage of memories happens on a synaptic level in most organisms ( Bramham and Messaoudi, 2005 ), but, in complex organisms like ourselves, there is also a second form of memory consolidation: systems consolidation moves, processes, and more permanently stores memories ( Frankland and Bontempi, 2005 ). Today, there are many models of how memory is consolidated in cognition. Single-system models posit that the hippocampus supports the neocortex in encoding and storing long-term memories through strengthening connections, finally leading the memory to become independent from the hippocampus (Ibid.). Multiple-trace theory instead proposes that each memory has a unique code or memory trace, which continues to involve the hippocampus to an extent ( Hintzman and Block, 1971 ; Hintzman, 1986 , 1990 ; Whittlesea, 1987 ; Versace et al., 2014 ; Briglia et al., 2018 ). In another theory, memory is understood as a form of negative entropy or rich energy ( Wiener, 1961 , 1988 ), which is then processed in a way that minimizes the expenditure of energy by the brain ( Friston, 2010 ; Van der Helm, 2016 ). Our heightened capacity to store information may be due to our ability to reduce disorder and process large amounts of information rapidly, a necessarily non-linear process ( Wiener, 1961 , 1988 ). The forgetting and fading of memories is also understood as being an important aspect of the functioning and utility of these memories ( Staniloiu and Markowitsch, 2012 ). As with a computer hard drive, memories can also be “corrupted” – false memories are commonly studied within forensic psychology ( Loftus, 2005 ). Together, these advances highlight how different kinds of memory storage are non-linear – that is, subject to complex systems interactions – contextual, and plastic. They also shed light on why, and how, we are able to live with such large quantities of information. It may not be that Funes has the special ability to remember everything, but that he lacks our ability to incorporate, and sort through, a potentially infinite amount of information.

The advance of the fields of genetics and epigenetics has also given us new metaphors to describe memory. We understand DNA as a structure that carries information that we call “genetic code” – kind of like a computer chip for biological processes. Today, the metaphor has come full circle and we can now use DNA to store and extract digital data ( Church et al., 2012 ). The study of epigenetics suggests that simple lifeforms pass on memories across generations through genetic code ( Klosin et al., 2017 ; Posner et al., 2019 ), suggesting a need to study whether humans and other complex life forms may do so as well. With these advances, our understanding of how memory is stored has expanded once again.

Further, we can now store memory in places that we haven’t been able to before. Smartphones, mind-controlled prosthetic limbs, and Google Glasses all offer new ways to store information and thereby interact with our surroundings. Our ability to produce information alters how we perceive the world, with far-reaching implications. As Stephen Hawking, the Nobel prize-winning physicist explained in his 1996 lecture, “Life in the universe,”

What distinguishes us from [our ancestors], is the knowledge that we have accumulated over the last 10000 years, and particularly, over the last three hundred. I think it is legitimate to take a broader view, and include externally transmitted information, as well as DNA, in the evolution of the human race ( Hawking, 1996 ).

The sheer quantity of available information today, as well as developments in an understanding of memory – from fixed and physical to dynamic, chemical, and a process of rich energy transfer – lead to a very different picture of memory than the one we had 100 years ago. Memory seems to exist everywhere, from an Aplysia ’s ganglion to DNA to a hard drive.

To account for these developments, cognitive scientists now propose that human cognition is actually extended beyond the brain in ways that theories of the mind did not previously recognize ( Clark and Chalmers, 1998 ; Clark, 2008 ). This approach is being called 4E cognition (Embodied, Embedded, Extended, and Enactive). For example, enactivism posits that cognition is a dynamic interaction between an organism and its environment ( Varela et al., 1991 ; Chemero, 2009 ; Menary, 2010 ; Rowlands, 2010 ; Favela and Chemero, 2016 ; Briglia et al., 2018 ). According to this framework, cognition is a process of incorporation between the environment and the body/brain/mind. To be clear, cognition is not incorporated in the surroundings, only the corpus can incorporate, and thus cognition (or what we call “mind”) is a product of the interaction between the brain, the body, and the environment.

Extending Memory

These developments indicate that we need to reconceptualize our definition of memory. What is the difference between trying to recall a childhood experience, and searching for an important email archived years ago? This distinction is best represented through the difference in how we use the words “memory” and “memories.” Usually, “memories” tends to refer to events recalled from the past, which are seen as more representational and subjective. In contrast, “memory” now is used to refer to storage of information in general , including in DNA, digital information storage, and neuro-chemical processes. Today, science has moved far beyond a popular understanding of memory as fixed, subjective, and personal. In the extended definition, it is simply the capacity to store and retrieve information . To illustrate why memory has extended beyond this original use, we want to ask the reader: what do a stressed-out driver and a snail have in common?

(1). A homeowner has been trying to sell her house for a year, and worrying about it. One day, she’s driving to work and becomes extremely anxious, for no apparent reason. She wasn’t thinking of anything in particular at the time. Confused, she looks around, and notices a billboard advertising a real estate agency. She realizes that she had seen it out of the corner of her eye, and her brain had then processed the information while she was thinking of something else, which then triggered the anxiety attack.

(2). Consider a nerve cell of an A. californica , a kind of sea snail, which is prodded vigorously for a short time period, provoking an immediate withdrawal response. Shortly afterward, it is prodded less intensely, but, it elicits the same withdrawal response. It is found that the slugs’ nerve cell is sensitive for up to 24 h – the nerve cells “remember” past pain.

Each example illustrates a different kind of chemical, biological process. In the first example, an outside stimulus triggers a stress response for the homeowner. We can surmise that though she didn’t “remember” anything, non-consciously, she did. In the second example, the snail certainly “remembers” the provocation, even though this memory is only stored in a few cells. But can we really call this memory?

However, on closer examination, we are forced to concede that each of them should be called a form of memory. First, consider the homeowner: her brain “remembers” something that does not occur to her as a conscious thought. It is clearly a chemical process occurring in the background. Most would grant that this would nevertheless be a form of memory, as it involves recalling information stored in her brain. Already, a broader definition of memory is used that does not imply conscious attention. Now, consider the snail: it is also storing information chemically. Once again, this does not involve a conscious, subjective process of storing and remembering – it is purely reactive, but information is being stored and recalled nonetheless. We would need to concede that if the homeowner’s experience counts as memory, then the slug’s automatic response does as well. There is in fact little difference between the first two examples: there is a transfer of information that causes a reaction. Both should be considered forms of memory.

A Slippery Slope?

If we agree with this expanded definition of memory, then it follows that experience is also a form of stored information, kinds of memory . We are not saying that a particular experience, as an event , is a memory. Rather, we here use the word “experience” as connoted by the phrase “an experienced driver,” an “experienced writer.” They have a set of experiences, remembered through practice, and retrieved when they drive, or write. When we accumulate knowledge, information, and techniques, then the accumulation of those separate processes constitute experience . This experience involves retrieval of information, conversely, being experienced is the process of retrieving memory.

Under this definition, even immunological and allergy processes may be considered memory. There is a storage of information of the allergen or the viral/bacterial aggressor and when the aggressor or allergen re-appears there is a cascade of inflammatory processes. This can be considered the storage and retrieval of information, and thus a form of memory. This does not contradict the accepted definition of memory within psychology, as it is still seen as the ability to encode, store, and recall information. Rather, it extends it to processes not just bound by the brain.

If memory is indeed defined as “the capacity to store and/or retrieve information,” then this may lead anyone to ask – what isn’t memory? Wouldn’t this definition of memory be far too broad, and include a vast range of phenomena? Is the extended definition of memory, as is being proposed by neurobiologists and cognitive theorists, a slippery slope?

As we suggested above, however, memory still involves a process of incorporation, that is, requiring a corpus . While memory may be stored on the cloud, it requires a system of incorporation with the body and therefore the mind. In other words, the “cloud” by itself is not memory, but operates through an infrastructure (laptops, smart phones, Google Glasses) that are integrated with the brain-mind through learned processes of storage and recall. The conditioning of an Aplysia ’s ganglion is incorporated into an organism. Memory, it seems, is not just mechanistic, but a dynamic process. It is a relationship – where one biological or chemical process is incorporated into another, and changes both in a permanent way. A broadened definition must account for this dynamic relationship between organisms and their environment.

How can we understand this process of incorporation? It appears that symbiotic incorporation of biological processes is quite common in nature. Recent studies offer more evidence that early cells acquired mitochondria by, at some point, incorporating external organisms into their own cell structure ( Thrash et al., 2011 ; Ferla et al., 2013 ). Mitochondria have their own genome, which is similar to that of bacteria. What was once a competitor and possibly a parasite became absorbed into the organism – and yet, the mitochondrion was not fully incorporated and retains many of its own processes of self-organization and memory storage, separate from the cell it resides in. This evolutionary process highlights the way by which external properties may become incorporated into the internal, changing both. Looking at natural and biological processes of incorporation can help us think of how incorporation of internal and external memory occurs in cognition.

Implications

This extended definition of memory may seem ludicrous and hard to accept. You may be tempted to throw up your hands and go back to the old, restricted, definition of memory – one that requires the transmission of subjective memories.

We beg you not to. There are several benefits of this approach to memory. First, in biology, expanding the definition of memory helps us shift from a focus on “experience” (which suggests an immaterial event) to a more material phenomenon: a deposit of events that may be stored and used afterward. By expanding the concept of memory, the study of memory within molecular neurobiology becomes more relevant and important. This expanded definition is in large part already widely accepted, for example, in Kandel’s Aplysia , conditioning is acknowledged to be a part of memory, and memory is not a part of conditioning. Memory would become the umbrella for learning, conditioning, and other processes of the mind/brain. Doing so changes the frame of observation from one which understands memory as a narrow, particular process, to one which understands it as a dynamic, fluid, and interactive phenomenon, neither just chemical or digital but integrated into our experience through multiple media. Second, it helps to conceptualize the relationship between biology, psychology, cognitive science, and computer science – as all three involve studying the transfer of information.

Third, it opens up an interesting way to imagine our own future. If we accept that there is such a thing as the storage of information outside the brain – and that this organic, dynamic process can also be called “memory” – then we open the door to a very different world. The mind is not static. Rather, like early cells acquiring mitochondria, it incorporates information from its surroundings, which in turn changes it. The brain, and the memory it uses, is a work in progress; we are not now who we were then. Many have already noted the extent to which we are cyborgs ( Harraway, 1991 ; Clark, 2003 , 2005 ); this neat line between human and technology may become more and more blurred as we develop specialized tools to store all kinds of information in our built environment. In what ways will the mind-brain function differently as it becomes increasingly more incorporated in its milieu, relying on it for information storage and processing?

Now let’s talk about Funes. His inability to forget his memories may seem familiar to some, a metaphor for our current condition. We may now recognize a bit of ourselves in him: we don’t see limits in our capacity to store new information, and the sheer availability of it is sometimes overwhelming. Even without the arrival of the Information Age, we carry with us through life a heavy load of disappointments, broken dreams, little tragedies and many memories. We know that forgetting is a must and a challenge. Yet, we are learning rapidly how to incorporate and use the massive amounts of data now available to us. The main challenge for each of us is to harness and control the unleashed powers given to us by technology. The future is uncertain, but some things remain the same. As Kandel (2007 , p. 10) wrote, “We are who we are in great measure because of what we learn, and what we remember.”

Author Contributions

GZ and AV drafted and edited the manuscript. Both authors contributed to manuscript revision, read, and approved the submitted version.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Michael Lifshitz, Ph.D. for reading an early copy of this article and providing feedback. The authors also wish to thank Steven J. Lynn, Alan M. Rapoport, and Morgan Craig for the feedback and encouragement.

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Home — Essay Samples — Psychology — Neuroscience — Essay On Memory And Memory

Essay on Memory and Memory

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Sensory Memory In Psychology: Definition & Examples

Ayesh Perera

B.A, MTS, Harvard University

Ayesh Perera, a Harvard graduate, has worked as a researcher in psychology and neuroscience under Dr. Kevin Majeres at Harvard Medical School.

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Saul McLeod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul McLeod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc

Associate Editor for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MSc Psychology of Education

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On This Page:

Sensory memory in psychology refers to the short-term retention of sensory information, like sights, sounds, and smells, immediately following stimuli input.

It’s a crucial stage in memory processing that briefly stores vast amounts of sensory data before it’s selectively filtered into conscious awareness as working memory.

Key Takeaways

• Sensory memory is a very short-term memory store for information being processed by the sense organs. Sensory memory has a limited duration to store information, typically less than a second.
• It is the first store of the multi-store model of memory .
• Sensory memory can be divided into subsystems called the sensory registers: asiconic, echoic, haptic, olfactory, and gustatory.
• Generally, iconic memory deals with visual sensing, echoic memory deals with auditory sensing, and haptic memory deals with tactile sensing.
• George Sperling’s experiments provided crucial initial insight into the workings of sensory memory.

What is Sensory Memory?

Sensory memory is a brief storage of information in humans wherein information is momentarily registered until it is recognized and perhaps transferred to short-term memory (Tripathy & Öǧmen, 2018).

Sensory memory allows for retaining sensory impressions following the cessation of the original stimulus (Coltheart, 1980).

Throughout our lives, we absorb tremendous information via our visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory, and olfactory senses (Coltheart, 1980).

Since it is impossible to permanently register each and every impression we have captured via these senses, as we momentarily focus on a pertinent detail in our environment, our sensory memory registers a brief snapshot of our environment, lasting for several hundred milliseconds.

Attention is the first step in remembering something, and if a person’s attention is focused on one of the sensory stores, then the data is transferred to short-term memory .

Types of Sensory Memory

Sensory memory can be divided into subsystems called the sensory registers: such as iconic, echoic, haptic, olfactory, and gustatory.

Iconic Memory

Iconic memory is the visual sensory memory register that stores visual images after its stimulus has ceased (Pratte, 2018). While iconic memory contains a huge capacity, it declines rapidly (Sperling, 1960).

Information stored in iconic memory generally disappears within half a second (depending on the brightness).

This fleeting storage of visual information allows the brain to process and understand visual stimuli from our environment. It’s named ‘iconic’ due to its relation to visual icons or images.

Close your eyes for one minute, and hold your hand about 25cm from your face ad then open and close your eyes. You should see an image of your hand that fades away in less than a second (Ellis, 1987).

Examples of Iconic Memory

• Seeing an ant on the wall
• Seeing an aircraft in the sky as you walk down the road
• Seeing the change in traffic lights

A recent study examined the hypothesis that iconic memory comprises fine-grained and coarse-grained memory traces (Cappiello & Zhang, 2016). The study employed a mathematical model to quantify each trace.

The outcome suggested that the dual-trace iconic memory model might be superior to the single-trace model.

Echoic Memory

Echoic memory is a type of sensory memory that specifically pertains to auditory information (sounds). It refers to the brief retention of sounds in our memory after the original noise has ceased.

This short-term auditory memory, which can last several seconds, allows the brain to process and comprehend sounds and spoken language even after the sound source is no longer present.

Clap your hands together once and see how the sound remains for a brief time and then fades away.

Examples of Echoic Memory

• Hearing the bark of a dog
• Hearing the whistle of a police officer
• Hearing the horn of a car

The information which we hear enters our organism as sound waves. These are sensed by the ears’ hair cells and processed afterward in the temporal lobe .

The processing of echoic memories generally takes 2 to 3 seconds (Darwin, Turvey & Crowder, 1972).

The recent use of the Mismatch Negativity (MMN) paradigm, which employs MEG and EEG recordings , has unveiled many characteristics of echoic memory (Sabri, Kareken, Dzemidzic, Lowe & Melara, 2003).

Consequently, language acquisition and change detection have been identified as some crucial functions of echoic memory.

Additionally, a study on echoic sensory alterations suggests that a presentation of a sound to a participant is sufficient to shape a trace of echoic memory which can be compared with a different sound (Inui, Urakawa, Yamashiro, Otsuru, Takeshima, Nishihara & Kakigi, 2010).

Moreover, a study of language acquisition indicates that children who start speaking late are likely to have an abridged echoic memory (Grossheinrich, Kademann, Bruder, Bartling & Suchodoletz, 2010).

Furthermore, lesions on or damage to the parietal lobe , the hippocampus , or the frontal lobe , would likely shorten echoic memory or/and slow its reaction time (Alain, Woods & Knight, 1998).

Haptic Memory

Haptic memory involves tactile sensory memories procured via the sense of touch through the sensory receptors, which can detect manifold sensations such as pain, pressure, pleasure, or itching (Dubrowski, 2009).

These memories tend to last for about two seconds.

It enables us to combine a series of touch sensations and to play a role in identifying objects we can’t see. E.g., Playing a song on the guitar or a sharp pencil on the back of the hand.

Examples of Haptic Memory

• Feeling a raindrop on your skin
• Feeling a key while typing on the keyboard
• Feeling a string as you play the guitar

The information which enters through sensory receptors travels via the spinal cord’s afferent neurons to the parietal lobe’s postcentral gyrus through the somatosensory system (Shih, Dubrowski & Carnahan, 2009; D’Esposito, Ballard, Zarahn & Aguirre, 2002).

fMRI studies suggest that certain neurons within the prefrontal cortex engage in motor preparation and sensory memory. Motor preparation provides a significant link to haptic memory’s role in motor responses.

Olfactory Memory

Olfactory sensory memory involves the brief retention of smell stimuli. It’s a type of sensory memory that allows us to retain and process odors momentarily.

Examples of Olfactory Memory

• Smelling the scent of chlorine and instantly remembering childhood spent at a public swimming pool.
• The scent of a specific soap brand triggers memories of a hotel stay during a memorable vacation.
• The aroma of fresh-cut grass evokes memories of playing in the backyard during summer.
• The smell of books evokes memories of studying in a library or a favorite reading spot.
• The smell of rain on dry soil, known as petrichor, triggers memories of rainy days.

This form of memory is powerful due to the strong links between olfaction and emotion/memory centers in the brain.

Gustatory Memory

Gustatory sensory memory is the temporary storage and recall of taste information. It refers to our ability to hold briefly and process tastes after we’ve experienced them.

This type of sensory memory is closely linked with olfactory (smell) memory due to the interconnected nature of taste and smell, and it can powerfully evoke recollections of specific events, places, or experiences associated with certain tastes.

Examples of Gustatory Memory

• Tasting a specific brand of ice cream and being reminded of your childhood when you used to eat it.
• The taste of a particular spice or ingredient in a dish reminds you of your grandmother’s cooking.
• Tasting an exotic fruit and recalling a trip to a foreign country.
• The flavor of a certain candy triggers memories of Halloween trick-or-treating.
• Tasting a type of wine and remembering a special occasion or celebration where it was served.

Sperling’s Experiments

In 1960, the cognitive psychologist George Sperling conducted an experiment using a tachistoscope to briefly present participants with sets of 12 letters arranged in a matrix that had three rows of letters (Schacter, Gilbert & Wegner, 2011).

The participants of the study were asked to look at the letters for approximately 1/20th of a second and recall them soon afterward.

During this procedure, described as free recall, the participants were able, on average, to recall 4 to 5 of the 9 letters which they had seen (Sperling, 1960).

While the conventional psychological view at the time would have pointed out that this outcome was merely the result of the participants’ not being able to retain all the letters in their minds, Sperling seemed to believe that the participants had actually mentally registered all the letters which they had seen (Sperling, 1960).

Sperling hypothesized that the participants had forgotten this information while attempting to recall it. In other words, Sperling held that all of the nine letters were, in fact, stored in the participants’ memory for a very short time, but that this memory had faded away. Hence, the participants could recall only 4 or 5 of the 9 letters.

Afterward, Sperling ran a second, slightly different experiment using the partial report technique. As earlier, the participants were shown three rows of letters for 1/20th of a second (Sperling, 1960).

However, this time, as the letters disappeared, the participants heard either a low-pitched, a medium-pitched, or a high-pitched tone.

The participants who heard the low-pitched tone had to report the bottom row, those who heard the medium-pitched tone had to report the middle row, and those who heard the high-pitched tone had to report the top row.

The individuals managed to recall the letters if the tone was sounded within 1/3rd of a second following the display of the letters (Sperling, 1960). However, the ability to report the letters declined drastically as the interval increased beyond 1/3rd of a second—an interval of more than one second rendered recalling almost impossible.

The experiment indicated that the participants could recall the information as long as they were focused on the pertinent row before the memory of the letters vanished.

Hence, they could not recall the letters if the tone was heard after the memory had faded.

Which process transfers information from sensory memory to short-term memory?

The process that transfers information from sensory memory to short-term memory is known as attention.

When we pay attention to a particular sensory stimulus, that information is transferred from the sensory memory (iconic, echoic, haptic, olfactory, or gustatory) to the short-term memory, also known as working memory, where it becomes part of our conscious awareness and can be further processed and encoded for longer-term storage.

How long does information last in sensory memory?

The duration of information in sensory memory varies based on the type of sensory input.

Iconic (visual) memory lasts about 100-200 milliseconds, echoic (auditory) memory can last up to 3-4 seconds, while haptic (touch), olfactory (smell), and gustatory (taste) memories have less defined durations but are generally considered brief.

If attention is not focused on these sensory impressions, they disappear quickly and are replaced by new sensory input.

What is the difference between iconic memory and echoic memory?

Iconic and echoic memory are types of sensory memory, but they differ in the sensory modality they process. Iconic memory refers to briefly retaining visual information, lasting about 100-200 milliseconds.

On the other hand, echoic memory relates to auditory information, maintaining sounds for a slightly longer duration, approximately 3-4 seconds. Their difference lies in the type of sensory input they handle – visual versus auditory.

In which memory store does information first have meaning?

Information first attains meaning in short-term memory , also known as working memory .

This is where the conscious processing of information occurs. Unlike sensory memory, which merely stores raw sensory input, short-term memory interprets and assigns meaning to these stimuli, allowing us to understand and respond to our environment.

Encoding in working memory can also facilitate the transfer of information to long-term memory for more permanent storage.

Alain, C., Woods, D. L., & Knight, R. T. (1998). A distributed cortical network for auditory sensory memory in humans. Brain research, 812 (1-2), 23-37.

Cappiello, M., & Zhang, W. (2016). A dual-trace model for visual sensory memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 42 (11), 1903.

Coltheart, M. (1980). Iconic memory and visible persistence. Perception & psychophysics, 27 (3), 183-228.

Darwin, C. J., Turvey, M. T., & Crowder, R. G. (1972). An auditory analogue of the Sperling partial report procedure: Evidence for brief auditory storage. Cognitive Psychology, 3 (2), 255-267.

D’Esposito, M., Ballard, D., Zarahn, E., & Aguirre, G. K. (2000). The role of prefrontal cortex in sensory memory and motor preparation: an event-related fMRI study. Neuroimage, 11 (5), 400-408.

Grossheinrich, N., Kademann, S., Bruder, J., Bartling, J., & Von Suchodoletz, W. (2010). Auditory sensory memory and language abilities in former late talkers: a mismatch negativity study. Psychophysiology, 47 (5), 822-830.

Inui, K., Urakawa, T., Yamashiro, K., Otsuru, N., Takeshima, Y., Nishihara, M., … & Kakigi, R. (2010). Echoic memory of a single pure tone indexed by change-related brain activity. BMC neuroscience, 11 (1), 1-10.

Pratte, M. S. (2018). Iconic memories die a sudden death. Psychological science, 29 (6), 877-887.

Sabri, M., Kareken, D. A., Dzemidzic, M., Lowe, M. J., & Melara, R. D. (2004). Neural correlates of auditory sensory memory and automatic change detection. Neuroimage, 21 (1), 69-74.

Shih, R., Dubrowski, A., & Carnahan, H. (2009, March). Evidence for haptic memory. In World Haptics 2009-Third Joint EuroHaptics conference and Symposium on Haptic Interfaces for Virtual Environment and Teleoperator Systems (pp. 145-149). IEEE.

Sperling, G. (1960). The information available in brief visual presentations. Psychological monographs: General and applied, 74 (11), 1.

Tripathy, S. P., & Öǧmen, H. (2018). Sensory memory is allocated exclusively to the current event-segment. Frontiers in psychology, 9 , 1435.

Further Information

• Sperling, G. (1960). The information available in brief visual presentations. Psychological monographs: General and applied, 74(11), 1.
• Öğmen, H., & Herzog, M. H. (2016). A new conceptualization of human visual sensory-memory. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, 830.
• Sligte, I. G., Vandenbroucke, A. R., Scholte, H. S., & Lamme, V. (2010). Detailed sensory memory, sloppy working memory. Frontiers in Psychology, 1, 175.

5 Ways Your Trusted Memory Is Tricking You

It's worth remembering that our memory can be a source of misinformation..

Posted August 31, 2024 | Reviewed by Margaret Foley

• We rarely associate our memory with misinformation.
• Yet trusting our memory too much can cause severe decision error.
• Remembering to pause and probe can boost your decision impact.

Who hasn’t forgotten their keys, wallet, passport, or password? Have you ever misremembered an important fact during a presentation or interview? Our brains are wired to misrecall, omit, and repress what matters. We even fabricate events that never happened. Yet, we trust our memory . What we may not realize is just how often salient images seduce us or the power of suggestion influences us.

Memories can be twisted, distorted, and manipulated, either by others or ourselves.

In today’s data-soaked, noisy world, it’s getting impossible to decode information accurately. It’s frightening. We discount this memory-based misinformation because it’s hidden, intangible, and uncomfortable. But it can spark a catalogue of human error that costs not only livelihoods but lives.

Five Reasons You Can’t Trust Your Memory

As processing capacity is finite, memory is recalled selectively in our neural networks. Studies show that up to 50 percent of our recollection is likely to be wrong, the result of "gist" memory. That’s a lot! Memory operates like your favorite movie but with missing scenes.

In my book Tune In: How to Make Smarter Decisions in a Noisy World , I devote a full chapter to neglected memory-based traps—traps that can derail decisions and prompt a rush to misjudgment. Here, I’ve identified several concepts that reveal how your memory lies to you.

1. The Forgetting Curve

When actions become automated, we don’t think about them. Forgetting your keys, wallet, and password is one thing. People also forget that guns are loaded, cigarettes stay burning, and children are left alone. According to KidsandCars.org, an average of 38 children die in hot cars each year in the U.S.

Hermann Ebbinghaus’s forgetting curve suggests we forget information an hour after receiving it. Memory worsens over time in age-related cognitive dysfunction. Because we forget negative memories quicker, people also recall a rosier past than reality—an incorrect decision input.

Consider the common slip of the tongue. In the 2008 presidential campaign, Joe Biden called Barack Obama “ Barack America .” In 2024, he introduced President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as President Putin, sealing his decision to quit. Even royalty fumbles. When Prince Charles delivered a speech in Canada, he announced the year as 1917, not 2017.

There is an upside, though. At times, forgetting trauma or bad memories can be positive for your mental health.

2. Remembering vs. Experiencing

A neglected source of misinformation lies in Daniel Kahneman’s " experiencing self" and "remembering self.’' The experiencing self lives in the present moment, responding to immediate emotions and sensations whereas the remembering self summarizes past experiences. The result? What we experience isn’t always what we remember.

Consider your last holiday or a Taylor Swift concert. Did you enjoy it? We remember events more fondly afterwards. Memory feeds us information based on our experience that we distort later. It's the misremembering self.

We also tend to recall peak moments and how an event ended rather than its duration. If Taylor Swift plays your favorite songs, the experience is positive. If you fight on the way home from a romantic weekend, those moments can ruin the whole experience.

3. Information Availability

Memories are triggered by ease of recall in availability bias . Fast-flowing information is misinterpreted as accurate. The risk is that we ignore what’s unfamiliar (e.g., famine), what’s hard to imagine (e.g., drowning), or what has low probability (e.g., crocodile attacks). The more vivid an image or idea, the easier the recall. Flashbulb memory suggests degradation occurs . For instance, survey participants were confident in their recall of 9/11 at 1, 6, and 32 weeks after the event, yet they significantly contradicted their original accounts.

The sequence of information also drives availability because we decide based on salience not relevance. For instance, the primacy effect describes a tendency to recall the first piece of information heard, like on a shopping list or agenda. In contrast, the recency effect reflects how we remember the last items heard.

4. Information Salience

Information repetition adds to salience and decision error. For instance, if fake news that the Pope endorses Kamala Harris for U.S. president goes viral, you’ll remember it . Psychologist Robert Zajonc found the more you’re exposed to a repeated ad or idea, the warmer you feel towards it and the more likely you think it is true—it’s the mere exposure effect .

Memory expert Elizabeth Loftus has warned about information salience and the misinformation effect in high-profile trials from Ted Bundy to Harvey Weinstein. As recall dilutes quickly, and especially under stress , evidence must be captured immediately. Italian investigators interviewed the 15 survivors of the Bayesian superyacht to avoid contamination. It’s the same in police investigations.

5. Suggestion and Distortion

Professionals such as retailers, politicians, and lawyers can manipulate memories through clever priming , idea planting, and the power of suggestion . The result is a false memory .

Certain psychologists explored whether people could recall specific ideas by implanting false information. These experiments started small, like getting lost in a shopping mall, releasing handbrakes, or spilling drinks at weddings. Over time, false ideas escalated in severity to near-drownings, punching others, or being attacked by animals. Subjects were convinced these fabricated events had occurred. Our memory tricks us.

You should consider memory-based misjudgment alongside other critical traps, such as time, identity , and story-based traps. Why? Memories of past decisions shape future decisions .

So, how do we minimize memory-based misjudgment?

At 58, John Basinger began studying Milton’s “Paradise Lost.” Eight years later, he had committed the entire 10,565 lines to memory, reciting it over three days—an exception that shows what’s possible.

You can preserve memory with regular practice. In high-stakes situations, verification makes sense with checklists, brainteasers, rhyming, and mnemonics. In business and in life, it’s our moral responsibility to make the right decisions and check input sources—especially if that source lies in the mirror. Don't forget!

Nuala Walsh is a non-executive director, behavioral scientist, and adjunct professor at Trinity College Dublin. She is the author of TUNE IN .

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Call for papers: Aging and motivation

Important dates.

• May 1, 2025: Initial manuscript proposals due
• May 31, 2025: Proposals evaluated, invitations for full manuscript submission sent to authors
• December 31, 2025: Full manuscript submission deadline

Guest editors

• Julia Spaniol, PhD, Toronto Metropolitan University
• Kendra Seaman, PhD, The University of Texas at Dallas
• Sebastian Horn, PhD, University of Zurich

Motivation is at the heart of psychological theories of lifespan development. The idea that age-variant motivational processes such as goal selection and goal-directed resource allocation serve critical adaptive functions throughout adulthood is at the core of most conceptualizations of healthy or successful aging. Research in the area of cognitive aging, typically employing cross-sectional research designs, has identified adult age differences in motivational influences on attention, memory, and decision making.

Parallel advances in cognitive and systems neuroscience have shed light on age-related changes in the neurobiological mechanisms of motivated thought and behavior. Together, these literatures point towards motivational processes as important targets for interventions aimed at improving health and wellbeing in aging and adulthood.

Special issue aims

This special issue will highlight new developments in research on motivational processes across the adult lifespan. Most articles will report new empirical findings of theoretical import. Studies that consider the role of individual differences (e.g., sex, gender, race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, culture), and studies that integrate previously-disparate theoretical or empirical approaches, are particularly welcome.

In the case of articles that report secondary analyses of data that have been published previously, authors should clearly identify the novel contribution of the work. Additional space in the special issue will be reserved for papers presenting new theoretical or methodological advances in an area of research on aging and motivation.

Suitable manuscripts may focus on conceptual, methodological, and empirical issues including but not limited to:

• efforts to characterize age-related changes in facets of intrinsic motivation, altruism, generativity, curiosity, interest, and flow;
• studies using experience sampling and other state-of-the-art methods for measuring change in motivational processes at multiple timescales;
• longitudinal investigations of motivational changes in adulthood;
• studies on motivated cognition that use innovative methods to elucidate biological and psychological mechanisms of motivation-cognition interactions across adulthood;
• studies examining motivational factors associated with psychological thriving and resilience in midlife and older adulthood;
• efforts to harness age-group specific personal goals to drive behavior change;
• studies on motivational dynamics in dyads and groups;
• research programs that investigate the effects of age-related motivational shifts in the workplace;
• new theories or refinement of existing theories about age-related motivational shifts based on new empirical work; and
• meta-analytic reviews of the existing literature on motivational processes in adulthood and aging.

Submission process

Interested authors should submit a short proposal (1000 words maximum, excluding references) that describes the paper they intend to write. When authors intend to employ existing datasets that have been used to examine motivational processes in past work, they should provide a brief justification of how their proposal moves beyond the existing work using that dataset (250 words maximum).

Proposals will be reviewed by the coeditors and evaluated using the following criteria:

• responsiveness to the call,
• degree of potential to enhance our understanding of daily age-related processes,
• scientific merit,
• likelihood of successful completion within timeline,
• fit with other submissions, and
• applicability to journal mission.

Please note that all manuscripts will undergo the regular review process and that the invitation of a full manuscript does not guarantee eventual acceptance.

Please submit manuscript proposals by emailing the coeditors for the special issue, Julia Spaniol , Kendra Seaman , and Sebastian Horn . In the subject line for the email, please state “Proposal for Psychology and Aging Special Issue.” In the cover letter, also please indicate that it is a proposal submitted to the special issue on “Aging and Motivation.”

Full submissions

All full submissions should be prepared in accordance with Psychology and Aging’s author guidelines and be submitted through the journal’s submission portal . We welcome submissions of both brief reports (3500 words) and articles (8000 words) to the special issue. Contributors should indicate in their cover letter that they would like to have the paper considered for the special issue on “Aging and Motivation.”

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Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art

In 1953, Roald Dahl published “ The Great Automatic Grammatizator ,” a short story about an electrical engineer who secretly desires to be a writer. One day, after completing construction of the world’s fastest calculating machine, the engineer realizes that “English grammar is governed by rules that are almost mathematical in their strictness.” He constructs a fiction-writing machine that can produce a five-thousand-word short story in thirty seconds; a novel takes fifteen minutes and requires the operator to manipulate handles and foot pedals, as if he were driving a car or playing an organ, to regulate the levels of humor and pathos. The resulting novels are so popular that, within a year, half the fiction published in English is a product of the engineer’s invention.

Is there anything about art that makes us think it can’t be created by pushing a button, as in Dahl’s imagination? Right now, the fiction generated by large language models like ChatGPT is terrible, but one can imagine that such programs might improve in the future. How good could they get? Could they get better than humans at writing fiction—or making paintings or movies—in the same way that calculators are better at addition and subtraction?

Art is notoriously hard to define, and so are the differences between good art and bad art. But let me offer a generalization: art is something that results from making a lot of choices. This might be easiest to explain if we use fiction writing as an example. When you are writing fiction, you are—consciously or unconsciously—making a choice about almost every word you type; to oversimplify, we can imagine that a ten-thousand-word short story requires something on the order of ten thousand choices. When you give a generative-A.I. program a prompt, you are making very few choices; if you supply a hundred-word prompt, you have made on the order of a hundred choices.

If an A.I. generates a ten-thousand-word story based on your prompt, it has to fill in for all of the choices that you are not making. There are various ways it can do this. One is to take an average of the choices that other writers have made, as represented by text found on the Internet; that average is equivalent to the least interesting choices possible, which is why A.I.-generated text is often really bland. Another is to instruct the program to engage in style mimicry, emulating the choices made by a specific writer, which produces a highly derivative story. In neither case is it creating interesting art.

I think the same underlying principle applies to visual art, although it’s harder to quantify the choices that a painter might make. Real paintings bear the mark of an enormous number of decisions. By comparison, a person using a text-to-image program like DALL-E enters a prompt such as “A knight in a suit of armor fights a fire-breathing dragon,” and lets the program do the rest. (The newest version of DALL-E accepts prompts of up to four thousand characters—hundreds of words, but not enough to describe every detail of a scene.) Most of the choices in the resulting image have to be borrowed from similar paintings found online; the image might be exquisitely rendered, but the person entering the prompt can’t claim credit for that.

Some commentators imagine that image generators will affect visual culture as much as the advent of photography once did. Although this might seem superficially plausible, the idea that photography is similar to generative A.I. deserves closer examination. When photography was first developed, I suspect it didn’t seem like an artistic medium because it wasn’t apparent that there were a lot of choices to be made; you just set up the camera and start the exposure. But over time people realized that there were a vast number of things you could do with cameras, and the artistry lies in the many choices that a photographer makes. It might not always be easy to articulate what the choices are, but when you compare an amateur’s photos to a professional’s, you can see the difference. So then the question becomes: Is there a similar opportunity to make a vast number of choices using a text-to-image generator? I think the answer is no. An artist—whether working digitally or with paint—implicitly makes far more decisions during the process of making a painting than would fit into a text prompt of a few hundred words.

We can imagine a text-to-image generator that, over the course of many sessions, lets you enter tens of thousands of words into its text box to enable extremely fine-grained control over the image you’re producing; this would be something analogous to Photoshop with a purely textual interface. I’d say that a person could use such a program and still deserve to be called an artist. The film director Bennett Miller has used DALL-E 2 to generate some very striking images that have been exhibited at the Gagosian gallery; to create them, he crafted detailed text prompts and then instructed DALL-E to revise and manipulate the generated images again and again. He generated more than a hundred thousand images to arrive at the twenty images in the exhibit. But he has said that he hasn’t been able to obtain comparable results on later releases of DALL-E . I suspect this might be because Miller was using DALL-E for something it’s not intended to do; it’s as if he hacked Microsoft Paint to make it behave like Photoshop, but as soon as a new version of Paint was released, his hacks stopped working. OpenAI probably isn’t trying to build a product to serve users like Miller, because a product that requires a user to work for months to create an image isn’t appealing to a wide audience. The company wants to offer a product that generates images with little effort.

It’s harder to imagine a program that, over many sessions, helps you write a good novel. This hypothetical writing program might require you to enter a hundred thousand words of prompts in order for it to generate an entirely different hundred thousand words that make up the novel you’re envisioning. It’s not clear to me what such a program would look like. Theoretically, if such a program existed, the user could perhaps deserve to be called the author. But, again, I don’t think companies like OpenAI want to create versions of ChatGPT that require just as much effort from users as writing a novel from scratch. The selling point of generative A.I. is that these programs generate vastly more than you put into them, and that is precisely what prevents them from being effective tools for artists.

The companies promoting generative-A.I. programs claim that they will unleash creativity. In essence, they are saying that art can be all inspiration and no perspiration—but these things cannot be easily separated. I’m not saying that art has to involve tedium. What I’m saying is that art requires making choices at every scale; the countless small-scale choices made during implementation are just as important to the final product as the few large-scale choices made during the conception. It is a mistake to equate “large-scale” with “important” when it comes to the choices made when creating art; the interrelationship between the large scale and the small scale is where the artistry lies.

Believing that inspiration outweighs everything else is, I suspect, a sign that someone is unfamiliar with the medium. I contend that this is true even if one’s goal is to create entertainment rather than high art. People often underestimate the effort required to entertain; a thriller novel may not live up to Kafka’s ideal of a book—an “axe for the frozen sea within us”—but it can still be as finely crafted as a Swiss watch. And an effective thriller is more than its premise or its plot. I doubt you could replace every sentence in a thriller with one that is semantically equivalent and have the resulting novel be as entertaining. This means that its sentences—and the small-scale choices they represent—help to determine the thriller’s effectiveness.

Many novelists have had the experience of being approached by someone convinced that they have a great idea for a novel, which they are willing to share in exchange for a fifty-fifty split of the proceeds. Such a person inadvertently reveals that they think formulating sentences is a nuisance rather than a fundamental part of storytelling in prose. Generative A.I. appeals to people who think they can express themselves in a medium without actually working in that medium. But the creators of traditional novels, paintings, and films are drawn to those art forms because they see the unique expressive potential that each medium affords. It is their eagerness to take full advantage of those potentialities that makes their work satisfying, whether as entertainment or as art.

Of course, most pieces of writing, whether articles or reports or e-mails, do not come with the expectation that they embody thousands of choices. In such cases, is there any harm in automating the task? Let me offer another generalization: any writing that deserves your attention as a reader is the result of effort expended by the person who wrote it. Effort during the writing process doesn’t guarantee the end product is worth reading, but worthwhile work cannot be made without it. The type of attention you pay when reading a personal e-mail is different from the type you pay when reading a business report, but in both cases it is only warranted when the writer put some thought into it.

Recently, Google aired a commercial during the Paris Olympics for Gemini, its competitor to OpenAI’s GPT-4 . The ad shows a father using Gemini to compose a fan letter, which his daughter will send to an Olympic athlete who inspires her. Google pulled the commercial after widespread backlash from viewers; a media professor called it “one of the most disturbing commercials I’ve ever seen.” It’s notable that people reacted this way, even though artistic creativity wasn’t the attribute being supplanted. No one expects a child’s fan letter to an athlete to be extraordinary; if the young girl had written the letter herself, it would likely have been indistinguishable from countless others. The significance of a child’s fan letter—both to the child who writes it and to the athlete who receives it—comes from its being heartfelt rather than from its being eloquent.

Many of us have sent store-bought greeting cards, knowing that it will be clear to the recipient that we didn’t compose the words ourselves. We don’t copy the words from a Hallmark card in our own handwriting, because that would feel dishonest. The programmer Simon Willison has described the training for large language models as “money laundering for copyrighted data,” which I find a useful way to think about the appeal of generative-A.I. programs: they let you engage in something like plagiarism, but there’s no guilt associated with it because it’s not clear even to you that you’re copying.

Some have claimed that large language models are not laundering the texts they’re trained on but, rather, learning from them, in the same way that human writers learn from the books they’ve read. But a large language model is not a writer; it’s not even a user of language. Language is, by definition, a system of communication, and it requires an intention to communicate. Your phone’s auto-complete may offer good suggestions or bad ones, but in neither case is it trying to say anything to you or the person you’re texting. The fact that ChatGPT can generate coherent sentences invites us to imagine that it understands language in a way that your phone’s auto-complete does not, but it has no more intention to communicate.

It is very easy to get ChatGPT to emit a series of words such as “I am happy to see you.” There are many things we don’t understand about how large language models work, but one thing we can be sure of is that ChatGPT is not happy to see you. A dog can communicate that it is happy to see you, and so can a prelinguistic child, even though both lack the capability to use words. ChatGPT feels nothing and desires nothing, and this lack of intention is why ChatGPT is not actually using language. What makes the words “I’m happy to see you” a linguistic utterance is not that the sequence of text tokens that it is made up of are well formed; what makes it a linguistic utterance is the intention to communicate something.

Because language comes so easily to us, it’s easy to forget that it lies on top of these other experiences of subjective feeling and of wanting to communicate that feeling. We’re tempted to project those experiences onto a large language model when it emits coherent sentences, but to do so is to fall prey to mimicry; it’s the same phenomenon as when butterflies evolve large dark spots on their wings that can fool birds into thinking they’re predators with big eyes. There is a context in which the dark spots are sufficient; birds are less likely to eat a butterfly that has them, and the butterfly doesn’t really care why it’s not being eaten, as long as it gets to live. But there is a big difference between a butterfly and a predator that poses a threat to a bird.

A person using generative A.I. to help them write might claim that they are drawing inspiration from the texts the model was trained on, but I would again argue that this differs from what we usually mean when we say one writer draws inspiration from another. Consider a college student who turns in a paper that consists solely of a five-page quotation from a book, stating that this quotation conveys exactly what she wanted to say, better than she could say it herself. Even if the student is completely candid with the instructor about what she’s done, it’s not accurate to say that she is drawing inspiration from the book she’s citing. The fact that a large language model can reword the quotation enough that the source is unidentifiable doesn’t change the fundamental nature of what’s going on.

As the linguist Emily M. Bender has noted, teachers don’t ask students to write essays because the world needs more student essays. The point of writing essays is to strengthen students’ critical-thinking skills; in the same way that lifting weights is useful no matter what sport an athlete plays, writing essays develops skills necessary for whatever job a college student will eventually get. Using ChatGPT to complete assignments is like bringing a forklift into the weight room; you will never improve your cognitive fitness that way.

Not all writing needs to be creative, or heartfelt, or even particularly good; sometimes it simply needs to exist. Such writing might support other goals, such as attracting views for advertising or satisfying bureaucratic requirements. When people are required to produce such text, we can hardly blame them for using whatever tools are available to accelerate the process. But is the world better off with more documents that have had minimal effort expended on them? It would be unrealistic to claim that if we refuse to use large language models, then the requirements to create low-quality text will disappear. However, I think it is inevitable that the more we use large language models to fulfill those requirements, the greater those requirements will eventually become. We are entering an era where someone might use a large language model to generate a document out of a bulleted list, and send it to a person who will use a large language model to condense that document into a bulleted list. Can anyone seriously argue that this is an improvement?

It’s not impossible that one day we will have computer programs that can do anything a human being can do, but, contrary to the claims of the companies promoting A.I., that is not something we’ll see in the next few years. Even in domains that have absolutely nothing to do with creativity, current A.I. programs have profound limitations that give us legitimate reasons to question whether they deserve to be called intelligent at all.

The computer scientist François Chollet has proposed the following distinction: skill is how well you perform at a task, while intelligence is how efficiently you gain new skills. I think this reflects our intuitions about human beings pretty well. Most people can learn a new skill given sufficient practice, but the faster the person picks up the skill, the more intelligent we think the person is. What’s interesting about this definition is that—unlike I.Q. tests—it’s also applicable to nonhuman entities; when a dog learns a new trick quickly, we consider that a sign of intelligence.

In 2019, researchers conducted an experiment in which they taught rats how to drive. They put the rats in little plastic containers with three copper-wire bars; when the mice put their paws on one of these bars, the container would either go forward, or turn left or turn right. The rats could see a plate of food on the other side of the room and tried to get their vehicles to go toward it. The researchers trained the rats for five minutes at a time, and after twenty-four practice sessions, the rats had become proficient at driving. Twenty-four trials were enough to master a task that no rat had likely ever encountered before in the evolutionary history of the species. I think that’s a good demonstration of intelligence.

Now consider the current A.I. programs that are widely acclaimed for their performance. AlphaZero, a program developed by Google’s DeepMind, plays chess better than any human player, but during its training it played forty-four million games, far more than any human can play in a lifetime. For it to master a new game, it will have to undergo a similarly enormous amount of training. By Chollet’s definition, programs like AlphaZero are highly skilled, but they aren’t particularly intelligent, because they aren’t efficient at gaining new skills. It is currently impossible to write a computer program capable of learning even a simple task in only twenty-four trials, if the programmer is not given information about the task beforehand.

Self-driving cars trained on millions of miles of driving can still crash into an overturned trailer truck, because such things are not commonly found in their training data, whereas humans taking their first driving class will know to stop. More than our ability to solve algebraic equations, our ability to cope with unfamiliar situations is a fundamental part of why we consider humans intelligent. Computers will not be able to replace humans until they acquire that type of competence, and that is still a long way off; for the time being, we’re just looking for jobs that can be done with turbocharged auto-complete.

Despite years of hype, the ability of generative A.I. to dramatically increase economic productivity remains theoretical. (Earlier this year, Goldman Sachs released a report titled “Gen AI: Too Much Spend, Too Little Benefit?”) The task that generative A.I. has been most successful at is lowering our expectations, both of the things we read and of ourselves when we write anything for others to read. It is a fundamentally dehumanizing technology because it treats us as less than what we are: creators and apprehenders of meaning. It reduces the amount of intention in the world.

Some individuals have defended large language models by saying that most of what human beings say or write isn’t particularly original. That is true, but it’s also irrelevant. When someone says “I’m sorry” to you, it doesn’t matter that other people have said sorry in the past; it doesn’t matter that “I’m sorry” is a string of text that is statistically unremarkable. If someone is being sincere, their apology is valuable and meaningful, even though apologies have previously been uttered. Likewise, when you tell someone that you’re happy to see them, you are saying something meaningful, even if it lacks novelty.

Something similar holds true for art. Whether you are creating a novel or a painting or a film, you are engaged in an act of communication between you and your audience. What you create doesn’t have to be utterly unlike every prior piece of art in human history to be valuable; the fact that you’re the one who is saying it, the fact that it derives from your unique life experience and arrives at a particular moment in the life of whoever is seeing your work, is what makes it new. We are all products of what has come before us, but it’s by living our lives in interaction with others that we bring meaning into the world. That is something that an auto-complete algorithm can never do, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. ♦

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Why Is the Loneliness Epidemic So Hard to Cure?

Maybe because we aren’t thinking about it in the right way.

Credit... Illustration by Max Guther. Concept by Alex Merto.

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By Matthew Shaer

Matthew Shaer is a contributing writer for the magazine and a founder of the podcast studio Campside Media.

• Published Aug. 27, 2024 Updated Aug. 28, 2024

In the early months of 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic settled over the country, a psychologist and Harvard lecturer named Richard Weissbourd approached his colleagues with a concept for a new kind of study. Loneliness, or the specter of it, seemed to Weissbourd to be everywhere — in the solitude of quarantine, in the darkened windows of the buildings on campus, in the Zoom squares that had come to serve as his primary conduit to his students. Two years earlier, he read a study from Cigna, the insurance provider, showing that 46 percent of Americans felt sometimes or always alone. In 2019, when Cigna replicated the study , the number of lonely respondents had grown to 52 percent. God knows what the data would say now, Weissbourd thought.

Listen to this article, read by James Patrick Cronin

“Initially, the idea was, OK, we’ve got a problem that’s not new but is obviously affecting lots of us, and that is now more visible than ever — it’s more present than ever,” Weissbourd told me. “What I really wanted was to get under the hood. Like, what does loneliness feel like to the lonely? What are the potential consequences? And what’s causing it?”

Finding answers to these types of questions is a notoriously difficult proposition. Loneliness is a compound or multidimensional emotion: It contains elements of sadness and anxiety, fear and heartache. The experience of it is inherently, intensely subjective, as any chronically lonely person can tell you. A clerk at a crowded grocery store can be wildly lonely, just as a wizened hermit living in a cave can weather solitude in perfect bliss. (If you want to infuriate an expert in loneliness, try confusing the word “isolation” with “loneliness.”) For convenience’ sake, most researchers still use the definition coined nearly three decades ago, in the early 1980s, by the social psychologists Daniel Perlman and Letitia Anne Peplau, who described loneliness as “a discrepancy between one’s desired and achieved levels of social relations.” Unfortunately, that definition is pretty subjective, too.

In order to understand the current crisis, Weissbourd, who serves as the faculty director of Making Caring Common — a Harvard Graduate School of Education project that collects and disseminates research on health and well-being — created a 66-question survey, which would be mailed to approximately 950 recipients around the United States. With the exception of a couple of straightforwardly phrased items — “In the past four weeks, how often have you felt lonely?” — a majority of the queries devised by Weissbourd and the project’s director of research and evaluation, Milena Batanova, approached the issue elliptically, from a variety of angles: “Do you feel like you reach out more to people than they reach out to you?” “Are there people in your life who ask you about your views on things that are important to you?” Or: “Has someone taken more than just a few minutes to ask how you are doing in a way that made you feel they genuinely cared?”

Several weeks later, the raw results were sent back to Weissbourd. “Frankly, I was knocked back,” he told me. “People were obviously really, really suffering,” and at a scale that dwarfed other findings on the topic. Thirty-six percent of the respondents reported feeling chronic loneliness in the previous month, with another 37 percent saying they experienced occasional or sporadic loneliness. As Weissbourd and Batanova had hoped, the answers to subsequent questions helped clarify why. Among the cohort identifying as lonely, 46 percent said they reached out to people more than people reached out to them. Nineteen percent said no one outside their family cared about them at all.

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