Difference Between Memory And Short-Term Memory

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The differences between long-term memory and short-term memory and their specific usage. In psychology, memory is the process in which information in encoded, stored and retrieved. The ability of being able to store information for retrieval later does seem to be a fascinating concept, it is no wonder that there have been varies studies on memories. From rudimentary methods such as Ebbinghaus’s (1886) pioneering experimental study on memory by memorizing thousands of nonsense syllables to Peterson & Peterson’s (1959) more sophisticated forms of experiments involving memorizing trigrams (three letter nonsense words) while counting backwards in threes. Experiments were all carried out for a single purpose, a deeper understanding in memory. …show more content…
The Sensory Register is very brief temporal storage and a combination of memory and perception which this essay would not be covering in further detail (Atkinson & Shiffrin, 1968). The short-term memory temporary holds information (Atkinson & Shiffrin, 1968). The final model would be the long-term memory which holds rehearsed (more on rehearsal later) information indefinitely (Atkinson & Shiffrin, 1968). A clear way to distinguish them would be that short-term memory is more focused on current events and on the opposite end of the spectrum long-term memory is concern with past events and information. Other differences would be that short-term memory requires conscious attention while again on the other side of things long-term memory relies on cues and can be triggered unconsciously. One can start to see the pattern between these two terms and their relationship. Moving on to the short-term …show more content…
According to Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968) the long-term memory is comprised of two main components, the explicit and the implicit memory. The first main component is the explicit memory and is a conscious recollection which consists of the, episodic, semantic, and autobiographical memory. The episodic memory is a collection of life-events/experiences which we can mentally recreate at any time as a sort of mental time travel (Tulving, 1972, Tulving, 2002). Semantic memory (Tulving, 1972) is concerned with general world knowledge such as, meaning, concepts, and facts. Additionally by applying past knowledge we can learn about new concepts (Saumier & Chertkow, 2002). Next is the spatial memory which is responsible for recording the environment and its spatial orientation, which can be thought of as a cognitive map (Tolman, 1948). Finally, autobiographical memory contains recollected episodes from the combination of episodic and semantic memory (Williams, Conway & Cohen, 2008). The second main component, implicit memory is an unconscious effort and the part which aids in the performance on a task based on past experience (Schacter, 1987). Implicit memory is most used in the form of procedural memory, an example of this kind of memory would be riding a bicycle. Riding a bicycle requires no conscious effort and it is based on one’s past experience. Since long-term memory is focused on past

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