What is Memory?

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What is memory? Memory is involved in all aspects of our lives, is it

a cognitive thinking process or a way of retaining information or is

it a number of connected stores or even actual information retained.

According to Reber (1985), it is possibly all of theses. Memory has

not been defined as a single process or fact and several theories

exist about its nature, character and structure.

We have vast amounts of information stored in our memory systems which

we are able to access quickly and effortlessly, this implies that

knowledge stored must be highly organised to allow us to retrieve the

appropriate information for a given situation. This organising will be

determined by the way that information is encoded into memory. The way

the knowledge is organised will determine the type of process required

to access that information in the future.

Atkinson and Shiffrin (1969) suggested that memory comprised of three

separate stores. The sensory memory store, the short-term memory and

the long term-memory each store has a specific and relatively

inflexible function. This was called the multi-store model.

There are two main memory stores short term memory (stm) and long term

memory (ltm),they are studies in terms of there ability to encode,

which means make sense of information, also by there capacity, how

much information is stored and by duration ,how long the information

can be stored.

How does the short-term memory store work? Conrad (1964) suggested

that short-term memory code all information acoustically. Visual

information is encoded to acoustic codes. In his experiment, He

presented participants with list of consonants and they looked at them

for three quarters of a second, then they had to recall what they had

seen. Conrad found that errors of recall were linked to letters which

had similar sounds, he referred to these errors as acoustic confusion,

but this did suggest his theory that information is encoded according

to sound.

Schulman (1970) disagreed with Conrad; he thought that short term

memory also encoded information but visually and according to

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