The Process of Loss and Retrieval of Memory - Research Paper Example

Although the ability to recapitulate may be improved with training, yet the automatic aspects of familiarity are age dependent and can not be improved this way. Clinicians and cognitive researchers have used the term short-term memory in different ways. Human mind continuously retains a small amount of information which plays a role in the mediation of short-term information retention. This is called primary memory. Another factor that plays an important role in this process is the information that was previously understood and encoded by the mind, yet it was not maintained in conscious awareness.

In order to recall such information, it is imperative that it is retrieved. This is called secondary memory. The normal process of aging or amnesia hardly affects the primary memory. Secondary memory, on the other hand, is the kind of memory which is concerned with the everyday episodic memory. Secondary memory’s “performance depends on the efficiency of encoding and retrieval processes, both of which should be sensitive to rehabilitation” (Craik et al., 2007, p. 133). There is another kind of memory which is known as the working memory.

 The efficiency of the working memory of an individual is fundamental to the displays of a whole array of cognitive behaviors by an individual especially if the activity calls for the individual’s increased participation of the central executive. Subsequent performance of recognition memory of the participants in the studies of the feeling of knowing (FOK) was found to be based on the objects which could not be currently recalled but had been initially encoded. Factors influencing the magnitude of FOK judgment include but are not limited to the contextual information and the extent to which it is linked with the unrecalled target.