Memory Storage Short-Term Memory And Long-Term Memory

"Memory... is the diary that we all carry about with us" (Oscar Wilde). Every page of our diary filled with a series of memories, but we wouldn 't have a perfectly diary. Sometimes we lost pictures in the diary, sometimes we miss spell words; just like memories will become vague and pass out of mind. Processing of memory includes "Encoding", " Storage" and "Retrieval"; those three parts correlate and restrict each other. Memory storage is a step encompasses how information is retained over time (Laura, 2013). As two of the systems involved in the memory storage short-term memory(STM) and the long-term memory(LTM) and play an important role when people recalling specific memory.

The paper will discuss both STM and LTM based on the textbook,

This is relying on what is known as STM also called "scratch-pad memory", that provides temporary recall information (Peterson, 1993). STM retain short time and have limited capacity, without rehearsal the information will decay soon forgotten and cannot be recovered. The explanation in the textbook "STM also retained memory usually only for 30 seconds and limited in capacity to store information for long time, unless people uses strategies to retain it longer" (Laura, 2013). An article record a research in Washington University to find out the aid of STM. In the study, the team let each volunteer viewed five words for 1.5 seconds each, then instructed them try to remember the words during 40 seconds while investigators measure changes in their cerebral blood flow with the positron emission tomography (PET) scanner (Peterson, 1993). The researcher Petersen (1993) said that, "both findings suggest a speech-based strategy is most often used to remember spoken and written items, those people who silently repeated words over and over performed better than those who attempted to remember what the words looked like." The volunteers involved in this research use rehearsal visually and spatially to improve STM because they didn 't get interrupted that makes the information retained indefinitely. Refer to textbook, the phonological loop which store speech-based information about the sounds of language help volunteers to retain well use rehearsal (Laura, 2013). Especially, verbal memory seems work better than visual memory in this research; decay of visual memory is covered in another article. Due to the study of STM, the author suggests that "decay of short-term visual memory involves a progressive loss of fine details, as if the memory were being blurred by coarser and coarser optics with