Short Term and Long Term Memory

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Encoding and retrieval are essential to the workings of the memory, and the fact that there are two main kinds of memory – short term and long term – is significant. Short term memory holds information for fairly short intervals, whereas long term memory stores information for a far longer amount of time. The relationship between both, as some Psychologists claim, is envisaged by stage theory. When information is encoded, it is stored in short term memory. It must remain there for a long time in order for it to be finally stored in long term memory. The means for retaining it in short term memory is known as ‘rehearsal’. By recalling information repeatedly, the chances of this information being transferred from short term to long term memory increases each time.
Information stored in short term memory has a very limited time span, and there are two main reasons for this. Information can be displaced .ie. old information somehow keeps being dumped whenever more recent information enters. Information can decay .ie. where the memory trace becomes eroded over time by an unknown physiological process, so it’s detail becomes progressively extinct. Often, each factor plays an equal role in memory loss. One way to encode information befre it is erased in short term memory is by a process of organisation. This means the individual groups together or pairs off the necessary information given in order to remember it (store it in short term memory) rather than learning information off at random. This process of organisation makes it much easier to remember information.
In order for learning to occur, the information in short-term memory must be manipulated or transformed. The person will have to rehearse it, convert it, link it, or perform some other action with the information or else it will fade. Cognitive Psychologists present a framework for analyzing this process based upon teacher characteristics, knowledge and presentation; learner prior knowledge, strategies, cognitive processing and affective processing. They call this information manipulation process the encoding process. These strategies emphasize one or more of the four fundamental cognitive processes of the encoding process - selection, construction, integration and acquisition. Rehearsal and affective strategies emphasize the selection and acquisition p...

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...ousal is purely implicit.
In conclusion, what is the relationship between encoding and retrieval? Well, retrieval is most likely successful if the context at the time of retrieval approximates that during original decoding, and the role of retrieval can help explain why there are better ways of encoding than others for later recall (the compatibility principle). This may help in storing information more efficiently, but there is a more important aspect to this – it allows information to be found more easily when being retrieved. The key to good encoding is to provide means for later retrieval.
There is another form of rehearsal (mentioned earlier) besides maintenance rehearsal, which is quite effective – elaborate rehearsal .ie. mental activities by which the individual organises the items he wishes to remember, encodes them, or relaets them to one another and to any stored information in long term memory. It may sound similar to maintenance rehearsal, but elaborate rehearsal increases the probability of later retrieval. Whatever else seen and thought about at the time of rehearsal will be linked to some of the items and can also serve as a retrieval cue later.

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