Memory in Psychology - Essay Example

Memory In psychology, memory means the ability of an individual to save the observed objects in the mind (brain). It is a single word describing most complicated function of the brain. It is the memory due to which we are doing our daily life works well. It is the memory that allow us to store the information and instructions given by our elders and implementing them in different situations. Memory gets weak with the passage of time. In late nineteenth century and earliest twentieth century, Memory was included in the cognitive Psychology. According to Atkinson and Schifrin (1969), memory takes three separate forms. The sensory memory, the short-term memory and the long term-memory each form has have a specific and relatively inflexible function. This model was called a multi-store model. There are two main memory stores short term memory (stm) and long term memory (Ltm), they are studies in terms of their ability to encode information, which means make sense of information, also by there their capacity, the volume of the information and the duration of its storage. Short memory allows recall for a period of several seconds to a minute without rehearsal. Conrad (1964) suggests that short-term memory code all information acoustically. Visual information is encoded to acoustic codes Types of Memory: Following is the chart showing the types of memory: Explanation: Following text contains a brief description of Long term memory and Short term memory: Long Term Memory: Long term memory is the ability of an individual to store the information about the objects for a long time. The volume of the information is unlimited. It can be a single word or a whole page of a book preserved in the brain for unlimited time period. Sometimes the time period is extended to the whole life of the individual. Capacity in long-term memory is unknown, and it is different between one person and another. Long term memory has further two types of it: 1- Explicit Memory 2- Implicit Memory Explicit Memory: Explicit memory comprises the conscious thought to recall the information saved in the mind. For example if a person visited some place and after the visit on any other day he/she tries to recall the event. The mind works to link the events and to provide the required information. In simple words, when we talk about some memory, either bad or good, we mean explicit memory. Episodic Memory: It is a type of Explicit Long term memory. It is the episodic memory that provides us a crucial record of our personal experiences. This memory appears to be located in the hippocampus of the brain with a support of cerebral cortex. Episodic memory was originally defined as memory for events; in retrieval of information from episodic memory the time and place of occurrence of events must be specified (Tulving, 1972). Tulving (2002) provides a compelling case of episodic memory as representing a unique mind- brain system that is unique to humans and that permits us to travel backward mentally in time to re-experience earlier events through remembering. Semantic Memory: It is another type of Explicit Long term memory. It accounts for our text book learning or general knowledge about the world. It allows us to speak without knowing when the information was learned or memorized. For example, New York is the biggest city, the Earth is oval shaped, Sun rises from East, etc. Scientists have not been succeeded yet in finding the exact location of this type of memory. Semantic memory ranges from recall to familiarity. It is better sustained over time. At the age of 60’s we are able to recall highly functioning semantic memory. Implicit Memory: Implicit memory is also called “Non – declarative” memory. It does not require conscious thought to recall the information. It is not easy to verbalize the implicit long memory as the information comes to the mind unintentionally. Procedural Memory: It is a type of implicit long term memory. It enables us to perform our daily life duties without conscious efforts to recall the information relative to them. In an experiment two groups of people one composed of amnesic patients with heavily impaired short term memory, and the other composed by the healthy subjects were asks several times to solve Tower of Hanoi puzzle. The first group showed the same improvements over time as the second group, even if some participants claimed that they did not even remember having seen the puzzle before. These findings strongly suggest that procedural memory is completely independent from declarative memory that stores the facts only (Cohen N.J, B.S et al 1985). Short Term Memory: Short term memory takes very short time to recall the information kept in mind. The time limit is less than even a second. It is just like when we read a sentence and do not understand it completely. We just go through the initial part to understand the last part of the sentence. For storing the idea or the fact described in the sentence we need to transfer it to long memory. This is a good example of short term memory. With the passage of time, short term memory becomes shorter due to cognitive conditions. This make us having trouble remembering the routine jobs e.g. a female may forget the steps of baking a cake or a male forget the way to maintain the records of his workplace. One may forget the phone number of a bank to which he/she has been contacting frequently in the past. More over when we grow older, it becomes difficult for us to transfer short term memory to long term memory resulting in many incidents such as forgetting to take medicine prescribed by the doctor or forgetting the stories, etc. Schulman (1970) suggest that short term memory encoded information also visually and according to semantics which is meaning. Schulmans research suggests that Conrad was incorrect in claiming that all short memory encoding were acoustic. In his experiment, Schulman shows participants a visual list of ten words. The participants were then asked to recall them. Recall was tested using probe words. The first probe word were words which sound the same but have different meaning (homonyms) , like hole and whole. The second one were different words with similar meanings (synonyms) for example talk and speak, the last probe word used were identical to the ones in the original list. Similar numbers of errors of recall from the original list were made for homonym and synonym probes. This suggests that semantic encoding as well as acoustic encoding occurs in short term memory. Short term memory has quite a smaller capacity. Miller (1956) researched that majority of the human beings tend to save on or around seven items in their respective short term memory, that are independent or discrete in nature. He also said that the capacity of the short-term memory may be enlarged by associating and links items to each other. In his research, Participants were given sentences of different lengths and they were asked to recall words in the correct order given in the sentence. The more sense the sentence made the better the recall. Most participants were able to recall around seven pieces of information. Memory is a cognitive thinking process, a way of retaining information and actual information is retained. Scientists have put a lot of time in discovering the mysteries of the Memory. Now it has gained an important place in the science. Its study is called cognitive neuroscience. Contemporary cognitive research summarized in Salisbury (1990), has stressed the critical importance of working memory. Working memory is critically important in language development (Gather Cole & Baddeley, 1993), and in reading (Breznitz & Share 1992) and failure in working memory is also responsible for learning disabilities (Hulme & Mackenzie, 1992). Human beings do all the working and active thinking in problem solving in working memory. Work Cited: Read More