Essay On Long Term Memory

Long-term memory is how humans process in the present, recall information from the past, or think about the future. Without long-term memory one cannot remember past memories, today, or what we may plan to do in the future. On top of that, there is no learning without long-term memory and the progress that we see today in our fast pace driven world would not exist. This is why the study and understanding of long-term memory is important for further knowledge of human nature. The long-term memory itself takes in many different forms of information including images, sounds, and meaning. The orientation of memory encompasses three important stages and the first is encoding. Encoding takes places in different locations inside the brain and this

In this study participants were scanned while carrying out multiple blocks of encoding tasks, and successive memory was tested outside of the scanner. Consistent with the previous data, ventrolateral frontal cortex activity had increased during the encoding period of the tasks that had been remembered. However, the differences between the two reports were between the analyses methods used to observe continual activity across each period of trials that was not precisely related to item processing. This data then suggest that, “when processing is directed away from specific items, VLPFC activity will be negatively correlated with subsequent memory performance” (Otten et al., 2002).

Additionally, an older work had been done to examine and exemplify that the amount of activity in the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex during long-term memory encoding can to a certain degree predict the possibility that the material encoded will be successfully recalled. In contrast to this, a study on long-term memory retrieval has highlighted the reliability of this presence and found evidence of this in the anterior, frontopolar prefrontal cortex. (Breweret al.,1998