Declarative Memory

Many years ago, I was a law enforcement officer with the City of Pocomoke. During my career, I had to testify in court to events and crimes that I witnessed or took a police report for. If ever a State's attorney or defense lawyer asked me to recall an event that I had temporarily forgotten, I could just refer to my police report. The police reports often helped me remember the events that took place. Good documentation was key to being successful with a case in court. In Chapter 6, the concepts of memory and forgetting were examined. Memory is “the process of encoding, storage, and retrieval of information” (Wood, Wood, & Boyd, 2014. p. 179). Our memories are processed by the Three Memory Systems, which were suggested by Shiffrin and Atkinson. The Three Memory Systems consists of sensory memory (temporary storage), short-term memory (less than 30 seconds), and long-term memory (from minutes to lifetime storage). Often the process of displacement occurs, when new information comes in and short-term memory is at capacity. In effect, older or temporary information/memories get forgotten. Psychologist Allan Baddeley suggested …show more content…
This is important because declarative memory is made up of episodic memory (record of events) and sematic memory (stores general facts/info). Each time we attempt to remember something, we have to go through the process of retrieving memories. Retrieval cues are used to search memories in order to remember a situation. Henry Roediger, a prominent memory researcher, believed in the element known as reconstruction. According to Wood, Wood, & Boyd (2014), reconstruction is “an account of an event that has been pieced together from a few highlights (p.188). So by retrieving memories, the process of reconstruction occurs which helps us recall an event. The problem with the reconstructive process is, that often and individual fills in memory gaps with inaccurate