Memory

Definition

Most contemporary researchers discuss three elements to the concept of memory: (1) Memory is the place or storage area where social and nonsocial information is held; (2) memory is also the specifics or content of an experience or event, also referred to as the memory trace; and (3) memory is the term used to describe the mental process through which people learn, store, or remember this information. In addition, when discussing memory and memory processes, researchers often refer to the related concept of a mental representation. A mental representation is an encoded construction that people can access, store, retrieve, and use in a variety of ways. For example, each person has a mental representation of his or her mother. The collections of feelings, beliefs, and knowledge you have about your mother constitute your mental representation of her.

Background and History

Memory is a topic that has enjoyed the attention of academics and thinkers for literally thousands of years. Almost 2,500 years ago, Plato argued that memory was a wax tablet whereupon one's everyday experiences left their impressions. An important consequence of this characterization, one that was accepted as truth for some time, is that once a memory is encoded it is set and unchangeable. Although a memory can be forgotten for some time, it could eventually be completely and accurately retrieved. Conversely, Aristotle argued that memories were associations among different stimuli and experiences. This idea was further developed by the likes of John Locke and David Hume in the 1600s and 1700s. An associative network allows for a greater fluidity of memory and implies that memories and mental representations may change or be forgotten over time. This latter view is more consistent with current psychological thought.

One of the most comprehensive early approaches to human memory was published by Hermann Ebbinghaus in his 1885 book on the subject. Ebbinghaus's work focused on the learning of new information (typically nonsense words), and he developed curves to describe how people learned and subsequently forgot new information. Many of his results have laid the foundations for current thought on learning and memory for new information. Some time later, Sir Frederic Bartlett began focusing on how existing knowledge influenced learning and memory. He proposed that memory was actually a constructive process and that people, in trying to recollect, often reconstructed memories from the fragments that were available. Since these early findings, understanding memory processes has been a focus in a number or areas of psychology including perception, behaviorism, verbal learning, and neuroscience. Consistent with this broad focus in the psychological literature, memory and memory effects have been a core subject of study in social psychology.

Development of Models of Memory

Within the concept of memory, researchers have made a distinction between explicit (often referred to as declarative) and implicit (often referred to as nondeclarative) memory. Explicit memory can be defined as the conscious or intentional act of trying to remember something (such as your mother's birthday), whereas implicit memory can be thought of as the way in which people's memories and prior experiences (i.e., mental representations) affect the way they think about and process information in their social worlds. An example of this would be how people's attitudes about a topic [Page 552](their beliefs or opinions stored in memory) affect how they process incoming information about that topic. For example, your attitude toward your mother influences your definition of what represents a good versus a bad mother. Importantly, with implicit memories, people are not necessarily aware that their memories have an influence on them. Explicit memory can be further divided into episodic memory (memory for specific events) and semantic memory (memory for the meaning of things, such as words).

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