MEMORY

Well, well, well, now we have come to one of the interesting topic in psychology which is Memory. Hahaha, I bet that each and everyone of you who was born in the era of technology might have come out with the idea that our memory  function like a computer which can stores data in a tremendous amount of data such as terabyte of data in  a hard disk. 

If yes, give yourself a great applause for yourself, because YESSS in someway our brain really do work like the computer that we have seen today. The only thing that seem to be different is that our brain have unlimited amount of data storage.

Nevertheless, human usually does not aware of their great capability. Some of us might even thought that you can only achieve that by having a big head like the guy in the left picture.

So, this is when psychology comes into good use in helping us to  understand more on memories.

Well, according to Dr. Stephen S. Sternberg(1999)

“Memory is the means by which we draw on our past experiences in order to use this information in the present’

Basically, Memory is essential to all our lives. Without a memory of the past we cannot operate in the present or think about the future.  We would not be able to remember what we did yesterday, what we have done today or what we plan to do tomorrow.  Without memory we could not learn anything.Memory is involved in processing vast amounts of information. This information takes many different forms, e.g. images, sounds or meaning. 

Plus, for your information, the reason why I choose a different kind of highlighter and color in each of the sentences is to show you an examples on one of the ways to increase our memory. 

Cool, right?

Ok, I think that's enough for the understanding part, let's move on to the three important aspects of information processing:

 

Memory Encoding

When information comes into our memory system (from sensory input), it needs to be changed into a form that the system can cope with, so that it can be stored.  Think of this as similar to changing your money into a different currency when you travel from one country to another.  For example, a word which is seen (in a book) may be stored if it is changed (encoded) into a sound or a meaning (i.e. semantic processing).

There are three main ways in which information can be encoded (changed): 

1. Visual (picture)

2. Acoustic (sound)

3. Semantic (meaning)

Memory Storage

This concerns the nature of memory stores, i.e. where the information is stored, how long the memory lasts for (duration), how much can be stored at any time (capacity) and what kind of information is held.  The way we store information affects the way we retrieve it.  There has been a significant amount of research regarding the differences between Short Term Memory (STM ) and Long Term Memory (LTM).

Memory Retrieval

This refers to getting information out storage.  If we can’t remember something, it may be because we are unable to retrieve it.  When we are asked to retrieve something from memory, the differences between STM and LTM become very clear.

STM is stored and retrieved sequentially.  For example, if a group of participants are given a list of words to remember, and then asked to recall the fourth word on the list, participants go through the list in the order they heard it in order to retrieve the information.

LTM is stored and retrieved by association.  This is why you can remember what you went upstairs for if you go back to the room where you first thought about it.

Like wise, in psychology, there are no certain explanation in understanding human or animal behavior. Same goes for the memory, there are no specific model to describe the process of memory. Ultimately, there are 3 model of process of memory which are Information-processing model, Levels-of-processing model and Parallel distributed processing (PDP) model. 

It would take whole days if I try to explain them one by one. That's why I would only be explaining the information-processing model which is widely use and acceptable by psychologists.

 Based on the model above, there are 3 main component which are Sensory Memory, Short-term memory(STM) and Long-term memory(LTM).

Sensory Memory

In this stage, information enters the nervous system through the sensory systems.In order, to do this we use two different kind of memory method, which is iconic memory and echoic memory. iconic memory is the vision that we captured for the moment which is as whole while echoic is the particular sound that we saved in our brain. Hence, logically, since the amount of data for storing of inforation by echoic memory is smaller than by using iconic memory, the echoic memory last longer compared to iconic memory.

STM

The process of STM is divided into two parts which are:-

Digit-span test – memory test in which a series of numbers is read to subjects in the experiment who are then asked to recall the numbers in order.

Chunking – bits of information are combined into meaningful units, or chunks, so that more information can be held in STM. 

        To keep the STM last longer, we also nee to do some maintenance rehearsal which is for example we read it out loud, storing the information into auditory form.

LTM

To explain LTM, I would show you the diagram below including it's explanation.

    Plus, did you know that the duration for the withstand of the memory in each part is different than the others!!!

Ultimately, the model can be understand more by drawing mind maps, included the information that have stated below.

Nevertheless after remembering, we should also have ways in retrieve back the information that had been stored in the memory system.

      Psychologists have underlined that people retrieve back their memory by the help of:-

      Retrieval cues -words, meanings, sounds, and other stimuli that are encoded at the same time as a new memory.

      Encoding specificity - occurs when physical surroundings become encoded as retrieval cues for specific memories.

In the next post, I would be explaining more on this topic focusing on the differences between recall and recognition