If you stop and think about the amount of information stored in your memory, it is pretty amazing that your brain can hold all of that and still make room for all of the new things you will learn over the rest of your life. Fortunately, with an understanding of how our memory works, you can enhance the way you store and recall information (i.e., study for an exam).

Three Levels – Sensory, Short Term & Long Term

Memory is organized into three levels, each with its own limitations.  Sensory memory allows our brain to take all of the information coming in from our sensory systems (e.g., eye, ears, nose) and hold on to it for a moment so that the information can be processed, organized, and interpreted.  For example, if we flash an image to your eyes, your sensory memory maintains that image for a fraction of a second to give you more time to understand the information coming in from your eyes.

Sensory information that is relevant to us at the moment or a memory we are thinking about are stored in short term memory, often referred to as working memory. Everything else that we need to save for later goes to long term memory. Read about these two and Miller’s Magic Number:

READ: Learning and Memory 

NOTE: The above article includes a discussion of short-term memory and explains that within it we can store iconic and acoustic information.  To help avoid some confusion, think about the difference between sensory and short-term memory in terms of whether you are actually experiencing the sensation or merely thinking about it.  So, for example, if I flash an image of a panda bear the information about what your eyes took in would be stored briefly in your sensory memory.  However, even without seeing a panda you can picture in your mind what it looks like.  We can process our memories of sounds and sights just like any other information in our short-term memory, but for our purposes we will ignore what they list as "the three basic operations" of short-term memory and leave the echoic and iconic stuff for sensory memory.

Chunking: Because short term memory is limited to Miller’s Magic Number, it is a lot harder to memorize one 10-digit number (9495214716) than it is to remember five 2-digit numbers (94-95-21-47-16). Chunking things together into meaningful units can help you encode and store information.

Three Processes – Encode, Store, & Retrieval

Who was the first president of the United States? That is not information that you likely use on a daily basis, but you nonetheless learned, retained, and just accessed that from your memory. McDermott and Roediger (2023) tell us how that works: 

Psychologists distinguish between three necessary stages in the learning and memory process: encoding, storage, and retrieval (Melton, 1963). Encoding is defined as the initial learning of information; storage refers to maintaining information over time; retrieval is the ability to access information when you need it. If you meet someone for the first time at a party, you need to encode her name (Lyn Goff) while you associate her name with her face. Then you need to maintain the information over time. If you see her a week later, you need to recognize her face and have it serve as a cue to retrieve her name. Any successful act of remembering requires that all three stages be intact. However, two types of errors can also occur. Forgetting is one type: you see the person you met at the party and you cannot recall her name. The other error is misremembering (false recall or false recognition): you see someone who looks like Lyn Goff and call the person by that name (false recognition of the face). Or, you might see the real Lyn Goff, recognize her face, but then call her by the name of another woman you met at the party (misrecall of her name). 

McDermott, K. B. & Roediger, H. L. (2023). Memory (encoding, storage, retrieval). In R. Biswas-Diener & E. Diener (Eds), Noba textbook series: Psychology. Champaign, IL: DEF publishers. Retrieved from http://noba.to/bdc4uger 

Next, watch this short video that describes memory in terms of a network of neural links in the brain. Note that the video goes on to describe two ways to effectively encode information… 

As the video explained, one method is to repeat things over and over again. This is known as maintenance rehearsal. If you want to memorize a phone number, you could repeat it to yourself over and over again until you have encoded the information well enough that it will be stored and available for retrieval whenever you need it.

One last note on storage… despite what this guy has to say about it, your storage capacity seems to be limitless. If you can encode it in a meaningful way and retrieve it regularly you can store it. 

Back to Unit 02 - Cognition, Intelligence & Memory