Short Term Memory Analysis

This film investigates the behaviours of someone with brain damage who suffers memory loss. On her father's birthday, Lucy and her father were involved in a serious car crash. This left her with anterograde amnesia and leads her to believe that it is October the 13th every day. Lucy ends up watching a video of her life every morning to fill her in on the details she cannot remember, allowing her to live life.

Memory is commonly described as a group of related and interacting processes that enable individuals to acquire, retain and retrieve information. This involved the three basic memory processes known as encoding, storage, and retrieval. Encoding is the process of converting information into a form that can be expressed and retained in memory. The second process is storage and is how information is retained so that it can be used at a later time. These two processes take part in converting information from the short-term memory (STM) into the long-term memory (LTM). Both of these are aided by rehearsal which is whereby something is consciously done to retain information in memory. The third is retrieval which is the process of locating and recovering information from the LTM to the STM so that you are consciously aware of it. Retrieval consists of recall which is the ability to retrieve it from LTM and recognition which involves correctly identifying or selecting previously learned information from a set of alternatives. Lucy does not have a problem with retrieval as she is able to access information from before the accident such as her family's name. However, …show more content…
One main cause of forgetting is brain damage which is a biological effect known as amnesia. Amnesia refers to a partial or complete loss of memory, either permanently or temporarily. For example, she meets Henry every day but forgets that she has met him before, no matter how many times she sees