Memory Vs Long Term Memory

Memory is an active system that receives information from the sense, organizes it and stores it away and retrieves it from storage (Baddley, 1996, 2003). Long Term Memory is the system responsible for holding information for long periods of time and is described as an “archive” of information about past events in our lives and knowledge we have learned (Goldstein, 2011). It was believed however, that there was a distinction between memories for events and memories for general knowledge and argued that Long Term Memory consists of two diverse yet interacting systems (Tulving, 1972, 1983).

The Taxonomy of Long Term Memory is in two separate systems – procedural and declarative. They are also known as Explicit Memory and Implicit Memory, respectively. Declarative memory

Additionally, higher the emotional arousal of the information, better the Long Term Memory of the information. Navine et al’s findings suggest that when words were rated high in survival value they were better remembered than other words. Ritchey and Radvansky’s n-back task proved that retention was better for emotional words. Mood Dependant Effects state that when there is a match between the learner’s mood and the emotional value of the material it results in better Long Term Memory. (Bower, 1981) This has clinical implications with regards to depression and negative learning material.

The concept of Cue Overload was that the more number of items of information are stored within one category the poorer will be the recall for any single item of memory stored within it. (Earhard, 1967) Thus the cue is said to be overloaded. Contrary to this effect is the concept of Cue Distinctiveness which states that the retrieval cue is most effective when it is highly distinctive and not related to any other target memories. (Roediger & Guynn,