Memory and Psychology

Abstract

Most contemporary researchers discuss three elements to the concept of memory: (1) Memory is the place or storage area where social and nonsocial information is held; (2) memory is also the specifics or content of an experience or event, also referred to as the memory trace; and (3) memory is the term used to describe the mental process through which people learn, store, or remember this information. In addition, when discussing memory and memory processes, researchers often refer to the related concept of a mental representation. A mental representation is an encoded construction that people can access, store, retrieve, and use in a variety of ways. For example, each person has a mental representation of his or her mother. The collections of feelings, beliefs, and knowledge you have about your mother constitute your mental representation of her.

Memory and Psychology

Introduction

The creation of new memories is an ability that occurs minute to minute in human beings (and some researchers would argue millisecond to millisecond) as people go about their daily lives encountering new information. Bäckman, et al (2000) mentions in fact, although people sometimes need to intentionally remember an appointment date or a phone number, many of life's everyday experiences are not intentionally rehearsed at the time for later remembering, but are created without intentional awareness. Human recall of certain events is not perfect, nor always detailed (Bäckman, et al, 2000). This transformation of past events is influenced by many factors relating to events occurring in one's environment and in the brain itself (Craik, et al, 1996).

Brain/Memory Relationships

In 1968 Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin were among the first researchers to propose that the formation of memories proceeds by passing through a series of stages. Information from the environment first flows through one's sensory organs (responsible for vision, hearing, smell, touch, and taste) into what Atkinson and Shiffrin termed the sensory store (Craik, et al, 1996). Numerous case studies have demonstrated that damage to the hippocampus leads to profound memory impairment (Craik and Joan, 1987). The most famous case study is that of an epileptic patient, H.M., whose hippocampus was surgically removed, leaving him with the inability to form any new memories despite the fact that he could remember events that occurred before the surgery and otherwise had a normal intelligence quotient (IQ).

Storage and Retrieval of Memories

The ability to remember information is based on two fundamental processes, encoding and retrieval. During encoding, incoming information is transmitted to the brain and is consolidated and prepared in the hippocampus and surrounding medial temporal regions for long-term memory storage (Craik and Joan, 1987 In 1994 Endel Tulving and colleagues reported that the left frontal lobe may play a more active role during information encoding, whereas the right frontal lobe may be more responsible for retrieval (Hasher and Rose, 1979).

The distinction between encoding and retrieval processes is key because if either process fails, a memory cannot be experienced (Hasher and Rose, 1979). In the case of H.M. encoding processes were impaired so that new experiences ...