Human Memory

The human memory is a very important skill that all humans have and need. Without the memory we wouldn’t be able to remember things that we have done or able to hold specific information. Philosophers have been interested in memory for over 2,000 years, but it is only in the last 50 years that psychologists have made a systematic study of the topic. Memory is studied within the branch of Psychology known as cognitive psychology, where you can find the subjects known as Thinking, perception, attention and memory. This is a research field which focuses on the mental process humans use to acquire, store, retrieve and use their knowledge about the world. The studies of memory first came about when Ebbinghaus (1885) used nonsense syllables and discovered two systems/stores. There was also wm James (1890) who developed primary and secondary memory.  

There are several theories of memory are based on the assumption that there are two types of memory

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  • Episodic memory (events)
  • Semantic memory (skills)

 Psychologists are able to draw a distinction between the two different types. Episodic memory is our memory for particular events and how where and when things happened. Whereas semantic memory is more concerned with skills and how we do things. We are then able to distinguish our every day skills and also are good and bad memories.

There are also three stages of the memory.

  • Encoding
  • Storage
  • Retrieval

When we are memorizing information there are three stages it goes through for us to remember.  To get a mental representation ...

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