Most memories {behavioral memory} {procedural memory, behavior} are about actions and behaviors. Primary motor cortex stores behavioral memories.
Memories {categorical memory} can be about classes or words.
People can learn facts and concepts {declarative memory}|. Declarative knowledge includes episodic memory and semantic memory. Declarative knowledge is things that people can remember and know. Declarative knowledge is proposition sets [Campbell, 1994]. People can recall declarative memory without affecting external behavior. Declarative knowledge contrasts with procedural knowledge.
Mental process {echoic memory}| briefly preserves stimulus pattern. Echoic memory is better than iconic memory.
People can have perfect image recall and can re-perceive images {eidetic imagery}|. People can preserve visual scenes and then scan them. Eidetic images are richer than other images. People who can recall everything rely on imagery but cannot understand general ideas or concepts, because details are too numerous [Luria, 1968] [Luria, 1980].
Memory of personal events {episodic memory} has location and time, is in frontal lobe, and involves medial temporal lobe and cortex. It can be unconscious or conscious.
Semantic memory, spatial memory, or episodic memory {explicit memory} {conscious memory} is conscious and reflective and encodes object, event, and relation representations. Memory associates two arbitrary stimuli.
Repetition, meaning, interest, attention, importance, previous-knowledge relations, and rehearsal strengthen declarative-memory encoding, because more conscious processing makes more retrieval cues [Corkin et al., 1997] [Damasio et al., 1985] [Milner, 1972] [Milner et al., 1998] [Sacks, 1985] [Scoville and Milner, 1957] [Standing, 1973] [Sternberg, 2001] [Wilson and Wearing, 1995].
Eyewitnesses {eyewitness testimony}| to crimes see fast, confusing, and unsettling events and so have weak memories, even if their confidence is high. Eyewitness people identification is especially poor.
The feeling that one knows something {familiarity, memory} is an immediate response to an event. The first concept about perception is if it is familiar or strange. It requires no conscious processing. Frequent observations cause it. It is independent of context and associations.
Emotion in amygdala, and arousal in serotonin, norepinephrine, dopamine, and acetylcholine systems, can cause people to remember one event strongly and in detail {flashbulb memory}.
Short-term visual memory {iconic image} {iconic memory} {fleeting memory} has images that persist after removing objects. Iconic image looks like image but faded. People can see all items but have not yet identified them.
Image is at fixed position on retina. New information there erases it.
Iconic images can appear to move, if moving stimuli are near them.
attention
Making iconic memory requires attention [Billock, 1997] [Coltheart, 1983] [Coltheart, 1999] [Crick, 1984] [Freedman et al., 2001] [Freedman et al., 2002] [Gegenfurtner and Sperling, 1993] [Keysers and Perrett, 2002] [Levick and Zacks, 1970] [Loftus et al., 1992] [Potter, 1993] [Potter and Levy, 1969] [Rolls and Tovee, 1994] [Sperling, 1960].
time
Echoic memory lasts longer than iconic memory.
cue
After looking tasks {Sperling task}, cues can help memory.
People can remember immediately after one presentation {immediate memory}| {latent memory}. Immediate memory lasts seconds. Immediate memory is neural-pathway electrochemical activity, like reverberations in circuits. Immediate memory can change synaptic strengths temporarily by affecting presynaptic biochemical pathways. Changing presentation rate or delaying recall time does not affect recall.
Memory can be for skill or task {implicit memory} {non-representational memory} {non-declarative memory} {procedural memory, implicit}. Implicit memory includes habituation, sensitization, motor skill, priming, habit, classical conditioning, operant conditioning, emotional learning, and perceptual skill.
People can learn how to perform tasks and to think and follow rules. Procedural knowledge can be production systems. Procedural knowledge is motor skills and perceptual and cognitive skills. Procedural knowledge is habits and know-how [Campbell, 1994].
process
Procedural memory uses many circuits and neuron groups but does not use representations.
consciousness
Implicit memory is unconscious and never becomes conscious. It is reflexive.
brain
Sense and motor processes integrate over thalamocortical system, cerebellum, hippocampus, and basal ganglia {global mapping}.
animals
Implicit memory is the same in animals and humans.
comparison
Procedural knowledge contrasts with declarative knowledge.
Animals can learn to fixate on another animal {imprinting, memory}|, so they ignore or avoid other individuals. Imprinting can be on parent {filial imprinting} or mate {sexual imprinting}. Imprinting is most effective between members of same species.
process
Imprinting is gradual but not associative. Imprinting with one object prevents further imprinting with other objects, except by prolonged exposure. Prolonged exposure does not eliminate the memory but only suppresses it. After prolonged exposure, original imprint comes back readily.
Brain processing can change short-term memories into stable memories {long-term memory}| (LTM) {labile memory} {secondary memory} {structural memory}. Short-term memory is process, but long-term memory is structure. Long-term memory involves interactions between two memory types: personal-experience episodic memory and fact semantic memory.
coding
Long-term memory uses mostly semantic code but also uses visual and phonemic codes. All three codes also operate in short-term memory but with different strengths and uses.
time
Long-term memory takes more than 45 seconds to form and can last lifetime.
properties: consciousness
Long-term memory is unconscious.
properties: interference
LTM can have phonological interference.
biology
Long-term memory involves cell changes and protein synthesis. Brain damage can impair long-term declarative and procedural memory but not short-term memory.
biology: drugs
After memory consolidation, drugs do not affect the memory [McCullough et al., 1999].
biology: electrical shock
After memory consolidation, electrical shock does not affect the memory [McCullough et al., 1999].
factors
Greater word concreteness, word frequency, imagery strength, and semantic similarity increase long-term memory. Phonetic similarity decreases long-term memory.
comparison
Perhaps, short-term memory and long-term memory differ only in retrieval method.
Working memory {phonological loop} can store sounds with meaning, such as spoken words. Perhaps, phonological loop has passive phoneme coding and active rehearsal [Baddeley, 1986] [Baddeley, 1990] [Baddeley, 2000].
Recall can be for recognition {recognition memory}. Memory can be about whether stimulus is familiar or not, was in place or at time, or associates with name or image.
process
To recognize if symbol is in short-term memory, people compare features. Matching determines recognition. With no overlap, knowledge of no match is rapid.
properties
Recognition is better for incidental learning than for deliberate learning. Recognition is typically better than recall, unless semantic association is very strong. Memory organization and repetition affect recognition memory and recall memory in same way, but word frequency, associations, presentation rate, concreteness, meaning, and imagery do not affect recognition memory and recall memory in same way, because some items are more and some less noticeable than others, and this affects recognition {mirror effect, recognition}.
Memories {semantic memory} can be about facts, meanings, and concepts. Conscious or unconscious fact memory has no particular location or time. Semantic memory involves medial temporal lobe but does not involve frontal lobe.
In senses, memory {sensory memory} first peripherally codes stimulus physical properties {physical code} {structural code} for sounds in echoic memory, sights in iconic memory, smells, tastes, and touches, taking one-third second. Sensory memory first stage does not need attention or consciousness.
Sensory memory second stage uses semantic coding and is central and automatic, taking two to 20 seconds.
recall
Higher overall stimulus intensity during and after stimulus decreases recall.
forgetting
Forgetting happens by decay and is minimal after one second for vision and four seconds for hearing. Forgetting loses location information but not item meaning or nature.
Memory {short-term memory}| (STM) {active memory} {primary memory} {working memory} {activity-dependent memory} can rehearse immediate memories, hold memories in consciousness, assist long-term memory, and decay in minutes to hours. Short-term memory puts objects and events in sequence to coordinate acquisition and retrieval.
properties: chunks
Short-term memory holds data chunks. Short-term memory holds 30 bits. People can remember chunks of three, if they must remember sequence. People can remember chunks of six or seven if there is no order [Cowan, 2001] [Miller, 1956] [Riddoch and Humphreys, 1995] [Shallice, 1988] [Sternberg, 1966] [Vallar and Shallice, 1990].
properties: interference
STM can have semantic interference.
biology: cells
Short-term memory involves no cell changes or protein synthesis.
biology: drugs
Amphetamine and strychnine affect short-term memory.
biology: brain
Prefrontal cortex neurons hold short-term memories for objects, locations, or both [Baddeley, 1986] [Baddeley, 1990] [Baddeley, 2000].
factors: age
Old age or brain damage does not affect short-term memory.
factors: language
Language production and comprehension require short-term memory.
working memory
Phonological loop stores sounds with meaning, such as spoken words. Visuospatial sketchpad stores images, such as faces and scenes. Working memory encodes attended content from sensory memory for non-conscious storage into long-term memory or other processing, such as sentence comprehension, and integrates content activated from long-term memory. Working memory holds content being actively processed, including conscious and near-conscious experiences and recently attended content, and includes perceptual and semantic representations. Working memory includes a goal-driven controller to determine which process to perform. Attention is part of working memory, or working memory holds attended conscious content {focus, Baddeley} [Baddeley, 1986] [Baddeley, 1990] [Baddeley, 2000].
Frontal lobe stores conscious event location and time memories {source memory}. Animals have less frontal lobe and so less source memory.
Spatial information travels from thalamus to neocortex to hippocampus {spatial memory}. Hippocampus has non-topographic cognitive space map, stored in pyramidal place cells. Place fields are stable and form in minutes [Brown et al., 1998]. Hippocampus place cells increase firing when body is at that location [Ekstrom et al., 2003] [Frank et al., 2000] [Nadel and Eichenbaum, 1999] [O'Keefe and Nadel, 1978] [Rolls, 1999] [Scalaidhe et al., 1997] [Wilson and McNaughton, 1993] [Zhang et al., 1998].
Memory {verbal memory} {verbal short-term memory} can be about words, sentences, and stories. People can learn word sounds and visual appearances [Campbell, 1994].
properties
Words are easier to learn if they have high imagery, are highly concrete, have high frequency, have many associations, or have high meaningfulness.
Verbal short-term memory has small register and rapid decay.
factors
Imagery, frequency, familiarity, concreteness, semantic similarity, and meaningfulness influence verbal short-term memory only little, unlike for long-term memory.
interference
Phonemic similarity interferes.
working memory
Working memory includes module for verbal short-term memory. Working memory executive controls module but does not interfere with other cognitive work.
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Date Modified: 2022.0225