At any given moment in real life, the senses are poured out. What will happen to all this coming in? Most of the information leaves your sensory memory within seconds. But the information you pay attention to goes from your sensory memory to your short-term memory. Short-term memory can be thought of as a link between our fast-changing sensory memory and our longer-lasting, long-term memory.
How long information stays in short-term memory depends on how you handle it.
If you don’t do anything with the information, only about 20 seconds will remain in your short-term memory. However, if the information is rehearsed, the information from which the information was rehearsed will be retained in short-term memory for a relatively long time.
This is called maintenance rehearsal.
Maintenance demonstration? It is simply a repetition of information mechanically in order to retain it in short-term memory. There is a limit to the amount of information that can be retained in short-term memory. George Miller discovered that 7 (+B-2) bottles could be stored in short-term memory as blue. A chunk is a meaningful unit of information.
To see how chunking information into 7 or fewer units can be an effective means of using short-term memory, try to memorize the following list of numbers – 19761814164314751203 If you are chunking numbers, you’re probably 1976.1814.1643.1475.1203 You will be able to remember everyone.
Long-term memory is a permanent repository of experiences, knowledge, and skills. Items in long-term memory can be short or can last a lifetime. One way to move information from long-term memory is an elaborative rehearsal, which organizes data and associates it with information in long-term memory that you already have. There are two types of long-term memory: procedural memory and declarative memory. Procedural memory is concerned with remembering how to do things, such as tying shoes, swimming, or riding a bike.
Declarative memory is where explicit information is stored. Sometimes this is called real memory. There are two types of declarative memory: semantic memory and episodic memory. Semantic memory is concerned with remembering general knowledge, especially the meanings and concepts of words. Episodic memory is the memory of a specific event or anecdote that has been personally experienced.
In general, the encoding of linguistic data in short-term memory is different from long-term memory.
The encoding of verbal material into short-term memory tends to be phonological or auditory rather than visual. For example, from short-term memory, when asked to recall letters, they tend to confuse them with sound letters like D and T rather than letters that look like D and O. Conversely, long-term memory items are likely to be encoded based on meaning. This claim was supported by the study of semantic priming.
In general, in a semantic task study, the subject must decide whether the stimulus is a word or not. In a classical experiment, subjects are presented with pairs of semantically related words, some of which are unrelated. The subject’s task is to press a button if two words are real words and not press a button if both words are not. This reaction time is faster if the two words are semantically related.
References:
Atkinson, R. C., & Shiffrin, R. M. (1968). Human memory: A proposed system and its control processes. In K. W. Spence & J. T. Spence (Eds.), The Psychology of Learning and Motivation: Advances in Research and Theory (Vol. 2). New York: Academic Press.
Tulving, E., Schacter, D. L., & Stark, H. (1982년). Priming effects in word-fragment completion are independent of recognition memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 8, 336-342.
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