Structure & Processes of Human Memory
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The subject of human memory has fascinated thinkers and scientists throughout recorded history. What people remember, and how they remember it, has an impact on every aspect of life. The performance of the simplest, everyday tasks is based on the ability to recall how they are done, and new information and experiences can only be fully assimilated if a framework of past experience exists. Despite its overwhelming importance, however, human memory was, for centuries, only a matter for speculation. It was not until the late nineteenth century that the empirical study of memory began. As successive theories of memory were proposed, they were subjected to testing. Whether the proposed theories were confirmed or denied by the testing, the results inevitably suggested new paths for investigation, and further theorizing. After over one hundred years of study and experiment, no definitive description of the operations of human memory has yet been formulated. Instead, the past century of investigation has produced increasingly refined conceptualizations of the structure and processes of human memory, and an ever-increasing number of empirical facts that must be taken into account by any new theory. Memory can be approached from two different perspectives--processes or structure--which are intimately intertwined. In both approaches, certain basic explanatory concepts have come to be generally accepted, and these "important commonalities" come as close as is currently possib
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ary memory, it can be rehearsed, and this rehearsal has two effects. Rehearsal can maintain information in the primary memory, and it can cause the transfer of the information to the long-term, or secondary, memory. But, without rehearsal, the information would quickly fade from the primary memory. Waugh and Norman also saw no reason not to assume that the capacity of the secondary memory was infinite, or that it retained information forever. Information was clearly much more difficult to retrieve from secondary than from primary memory, and they argued that "even if a piece of information is present in secondary memory, we might not be able to find it" (Greene, 1992, p. 51).
This two-store model gained wide acceptance initially. This may have been due, in part, to the fact that it reflected the memory architecture of computers, at a time when "the idea that the human mind operates as a kind of computer" had also begun to be widely accepted (Greene, 1992, p. 52). The two-store model was, however, soon replaced by a more detailed elaboration of the idea that was proposed by Atkinson and Shiffrin in 1968.
Atkinson and Shiffrin made the "first systematic attempt to incorporate the notion of a short-term store within a gener
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Morris Conway, Atkinson Shiffrin's, Atkinson Shiffrin, William James, , Waugh Norman, Hermann Ebbinghaus, Hanna Remington, Engelkamp Zimmer, Craik Lockhart, memory systems, memory system, baddeley 1990, short-term memory, long-term memory, morris conway, morris conway 1993, conway 1993, atkinson shiffrin, parkin 1993, human memory, cohen et al, et al 1986, engelkamp zimmer 1994, conway 1993 xvi,
Approximate Word count = 6428
Approximate Pages = 26 (250 words per page)
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