HUMAN MEMORY

This delineation is followed by a brief review of some empirical investigations of human memory in general and semantic memory in particular, with an emphasis upon information loss or forgetting. This area of the vast body of empirical research was selected because, current thought in the literature held that it was the area most in need of further work, and it is not amply covered by the existing theoretical models of semantic memory.

In 1890, William James observed that there appeared to be two distinct kinds of human memory, a kind that was fleeting and another, more permanent kind:

The stream of thought flows on, but most of its elements fall into the bottomless pit of oblivion. Of some, no element survives the instant of its passage. Of others, it is confined to a few moments, hours, or days. Others, again, leave vestiges which are indestructible, and by means of which may be recalled as l

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then, within a probablistic framework, turn into a long-term memory trace with a strength value that can decay over time. Retrieval, in the ACT model, is said to involve an activation of the network that comprises semantic memory, an activation that can decay with attentional shifts. Anderson (1984) has delineated three basic premises that underlie the construct of spreading activation: (1) a representational premise which states that knowledge is represented as a network of nodes and links where nodes are the concepts and links are their associations; (2) a state premise which holds that nodes can vary in level of activation and that the greater the level of activation the better the processing; and (3) a process premise which states that as activation spreads along various network byways, the activation of a single node causes the activation of neighboring nodes. Howard (1983) has noted that this theory is very compatible with what is currently known about neurophysiology. The second major type of theoretical model formulated to account for semantic memory is the feature comparison model. In order to fully understand feature comparison model it is necessary to understand that the network models notion of properties of an
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Loftus Loftus, Karlin Dueck, Koch Leary, Retrieval ACT, Loftus Healy, Shoben Rips, Levy-Berger Haydon, MEMORY Introduction, Collins Quillian, Spanish Bahrick, semantic memory, human memory, memory systems, models semantic memory, long-term memory, memory system, models semantic, koch leary, leary 1985, feature comparison, information loss, koch leary 1985, dominowski loftus healy, bourne dominowski loftus, karlin dueck 1975,
Approximate Word count = 2730
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)

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