Ch 6Human Memory — Class 11 Psychology, concept-first.

Memory is the mental faculty that lets us hold on to and later bring back information we have taken in — from a phone number we need for the next thirty seconds to the poem we memorised as a child and…

Memory is best understood as retaining and recalling information over time, and how long that information needs to be held depends entirely on the task at hand — sometimes we only need to hold on to s…

Before the Stage Model, memory was pictured as a single, vast storehouse holding everything a person had ever learned through experience, which could be drawn upon whenever needed.

The Stage Model proposes three memory systems that information passes through, one after another, each performing a different job: Sensory Memory, Short-term Memory (STM), and Long-term Memory (LTM).

Sensory memory is the very first stop for any incoming information. It has a large capacity — it can register information arriving from every one of our senses, and it does so with reasonable accuracy…

Not every piece of information registered by our senses gets attended to — in fact, most of it does not.

Any material that survives the tight capacity and duration limits of short-term memory finally enters long-term memory (LTM), which functions as a vast, essentially permanent storehouse.

In recent decades, psychologists have moved away from thinking of short-term memory as one single, uniform store, proposing instead that it is made up of several distinct components.

The Levels of Processing view was put forward by Craik and Lockhart in 1972, as an alternative to thinking about memory purely in terms of separate stores.

Just as short-term memory is now understood as having several components rather than being a single uniform store, long-term memory too is thought of as containing a wide variety of information rather…

Declarative memory covers all the information we hold about facts, names, and dates — knowing that a rickshaw has three wheels, that India became independent on 15 August 1947, that a frog is an amphi…

Within declarative memory, Tulving proposed a further division between episodic memory and semantic memory.

Beyond the declarative/procedural and episodic/semantic distinctions, research has identified several further phenomena that reveal just how complex and varied long-term memory really is.

Because there are many distinct kinds of memory, no single experimental method is appropriate for studying all of them — a method well suited to measuring one type of memory may simply not work for an…

Forgetting is something every person experiences routinely, along with its consequences — the embarrassment of not recalling a familiar name, or the panic of finding that carefully memorised material…

Trace decay theory, also called the disuse theory, is the earliest theory put forward to explain forgetting.

If simple decay through disuse cannot fully explain forgetting, an alternative and considerably more influential theory is interference theory.

Some individuals go through experiences that are genuinely traumatic — experiences that emotionally hurt a person in a lasting way.

Forgetting does not only occur because memory traces decay over time, as the disuse theory suggested, or because independently stored associations compete with one another at the moment of recall, as…

Nobody enjoys the anxiety and embarrassment that come with memory failures, and it is natural to want a memory system that is robust and dependable.

Mnemonics that rely on images work by requiring a person to build vivid, interacting mental pictures of and around the material they want to remember.

A second family of mnemonic techniques works not through imagery but through organisation — imposing a deliberate structure on the material to be remembered.

Mnemonic techniques such as imagery and organisation are useful, but on their own they are somewhat simplistic and can underestimate just how complex memory tasks and the difficulties people face whil…