Cognitive Processing : The Mental Capacity Of Humans And Animals Essay

Memory is the process of encoding, storing and retrieving information in the brain. It plays an import role in our daily life. Without memory, we cannot reserve past experience, learn new things and plan for the future. Human memory is usually analogous to computer memory. While unlike computer memory, human memory is a cognitive system. It does not encode and store everything correctly as we want. As suggested by Zimbardo, Johnson and Weber (2006), human memory takes information and selectively converts it into meaningful patterns. When remembering, we reconstruct the incident as we think it was (p. 263). Sometimes our memory performance is incredibly accurate and reliable. But errors and mistakes are more commonly happen, because we do

|  Episodic memory is recollection of specific events;  Semantic memory is the recollection of general knowledge and facts.

- “Episodic memory is defined as the conscious retrieval of personal experiences occurring within a specific context”

According to Shiffrin & Atkinson (1969), long-term memory is defined as the processes by which information is stored in and retrieved from. The two processes involved in long-term memory are encoding and retrieval. Encoding refers to the process in which information is learned and converted into a memory representation, whereas retrieval refers to accessing previously stored information (Shiffrin & Atkinson, 1969). The two forms of long-term memory are declarative or explicit memory and non-declarative or implicit memory. Declarative memory (DM) refers to subsystems of long-term memory that can be deliberately, intentionally or consciously recollected. These subsystems are known as episodic memory and semantic memory (Squire, 1992). Episodic memory is defined as the long-term memory subsystem that stores information about past events, occurrences or episodes related to an individual 's life and is used to recall such events or episodes. Semantic memory is a long term memory system that stores and recollects facts and general knowledge (Squire & Zola, 1998). Recognition or recall tasks are usually used to measure DM (Wagner et al, 1998). Non-declarative memory (NDM) refers to the memory subsystem that impacts recent perceptions and behaviour without knowledge, consciousness and intent. The subsystem within NDM involved in long-term memory is known as procedural memory (Squire, 1992).The NDM of skills is termed as procedural memory. The process involves learning a skill or

Some scientists believe that parts of long term memory are permanent while others will eventually weaken over time. (3) Long term memory can be divided into three sections: procedural memory, declarative memory, and remote memory. Procedural memory includes motor skills such as learning how to ride a bike or how to drive a car. "Such memories are slow to acquire but more resistant to change or loss." (4) Declarative memory is used to remember facts, such as names, dates and places. It is easy to learn but also easy to lose. Finally there is episodic memory, which is the record of events that a person stores throughout his or her experience. Recent studies show that these events, as soon as they occur, are sent to a temporary part of the brain called the hippocampus, and that over time they are moved to the neocortex for permanent storage. (5).

Memory is a property of the human mind. It describes the ability to retain information. There are different types of classifications for memory based on duration, nature and retrieval of items.

Squire et al. (2004) argue that the medial temporal lobe is essential to the system for conscious “declarative” (conscious) memory. In contrast, in Henke (2010)’ s view, the role of the medial temporal lobe, especially the hippocampus, is to support rapid encoding of flexible associations (i.e. episodic memory) regardless of conscious awareness. She indicates that consciousness is not a necessary feature of hippocampus related memories. Henke also does not use the term “declarative memory” since not all the hippocampus-dependent memory can be consciously “declared”.

People tend to think of memories as a set of individual recollections of specific, chronological events. In reality, though, human memory is much more nuanced and complex than just the storage of data like might be stored on a computer hard drive. Memory is far more colored and far less accurate than simple data storage. One individual’s memory of an event may be entirely different than another individual’s memory of that same event because of differences

During the discussion on memory, we deliberated on the difference between emotional, procedural and episodic memory, the correlation between identity and humanity, the perception of time, and the ability of self-realization. Firstly, we explicated the emotional aspect of Clive Wearing’s severe case of amnesia, but also realized his love for Deborah (his wife) and music were bittersweet. His raw emotional memory was left untouched, whereas his episodic memory was severely affected. Furthermore, we examined the parallels between identity and humanity. Some believed that being human means to display emotions, whereas others affirmed that emotions require episodic memory. Moreover, we concluded that memory is inherently altered through repetition.

According to Levels of Processing framework, developed by Craik and Lockhart (1972), the duration that a memory is held, is determined by the level at which the information is encoded. Episodic memory recall is a cognitive process involved in consolidating the information presented. The ‘depth’ of processing occurring during the encoding of a memory, relates to, how well information is recalled later. To clarify, information that we process semantically (i.e., by its meaning) comprises a deeper level of processing than information we process structurally (i.e., appearance). Thus predicting, the deeper an individual processes information, correlates with the duration a memory trace will last. Consequently, memory is a by-product

The notion of an episodic and semantic memory as part of a category of memory is one that is one that has had copious amounts of research and is a mental phenomenon in which information is encoded, stored and retrieved. The process of memory affects every aspect of our daily lives and has led to much neurological and cognitive research, as well as behavioural and psychoanalytical, amongst other theories, and an equivalent amount of research has been spent into finding out the extent of how damages to processes of memory affect us on a daily basis. Failure of memory can normally result from failure to adequately store the memory in the first place, failure to retain the information and failure to retrieve the information later on. Neuro-imaging studies using techniques such as MRI and post-mortem work have shown that structural abnormalities in brain regions such as the frontal lobes, amygdala and cerebellum and also lesioning of the hippocampus in a connectionist model results in a similar temporal gradient in memory retrieval to that seen in amnesic patients with hippocampal damage (Alvarez and Squire, 1994). The distinctions between areas of memory is complex and commonly disputed, likely consisting of multiple areas and categories however in this essay I will be focusing on semantic and episodic memory, as distinctive categories of memory. In order to discuss the distinction between episodic and semantic memory, we must first look into each one individually

Memory is a huge area of interest as it affects our everyday life and without it we would be dramatically impaired. Multiple studies have been conducted to find out more about memory, such as the study by McDougall (1923) into implicit and explicit recognition, and the study by Bruner (1969) on different types of memory. However squire (2004) believed that more experiments testing how the brain stored information were needed. In the past decade, theories about memories have changed dramatically due to the increase in studies exploring memory (Zola-Morgan & Squire, 1993). One change of theory was the acknowledgement that there was more than one type of memory; long-term and short-term (Zola-Morgan & Squire, 1993; Schacter, 1987). Studies researching memory soon went on to distinguish between two types of long-term memory; declarative and non-declarative memory (Krupa, 2009). Declarative memory, also known as explicit memory, is the conscious memories we store about facts (semantic memory) and events (episodic memory) (Zola-Morgan & Squire, 1993; Byrne, ….). The opposite of this is non-declarative memory, also known as implicit memory. Non-declarative memory refers to our unconscious memory and skills and habits we learn such as riding a bike (Byrne, n.d.). It also includes simple forms of associative learning (conditioning) and non-associative learning as well (Byrne, n.d.).

Memory makes us. It is, to an extent, a collection of unique and personal experiences that we, as individuals, have amassed over our lifetime. It is what connects us to our past and what shapes our present and the future. If we are unable remember the what, when, where, and who of our everyday lives, our level of functioning would be greatly impacted. Memory is defined as or recognized as the “sum or total of what we remember.” Memory provides us the ability to learn and adjust to or from prior experiences. In addition, memory or our ability to remember plays an integral role in the building and sustaining of relationships. Additionally, memory is also a process; it is how we internalize and store our external environment and experiences. It entails the capacity to remember past experiences, and the process of recalling previous experiences, information, impressions, habits and skills to awareness. It is the storage of materials learned and/or retained from our experiences. This fact is demonstrated by the modification, adjustment and/or adaptation of structure or behavior. Furthermore, we as individuals, envision thoughts and ideas of the present through short-term memory, or in our working memory, we warehouse past experiences and learned values in long-term memory, also referred to as episodic or semantic memory. Most importantly, memory is malleable and it is intimately linked to our sense of identity and where we believe we belong in the world.

Whether or not we acknowledge it, memory is one of the most important processes that our brain preforms every day. Everything we do sensory or procedural is recorded in some way into our memories, some memories only last a brief amount of time while others may last a life time depending on the amount of rehearsal and encoding. Though this is by far not a perfect system, we create schemas in our brains (or short-cuts) to aid in memory; yet sometimes due to these schemas we actually not remember something properly creating a false memory (Olszewska & Ulatowska, 2013). This due to an error in the person’s episodic memory, this is the type of memory that is person specific for remembering events; word pairs or particular words seen in a list (Cabeza et al., 1997). Finding put such a phenomenon has led to many to study how memory works, and ways too mesure what memory actually is. We can test this episodic memory using recall tests in which participants try to write the remembered word. Another test would be a recognition test in which studied items, such as a word list, are mixed with new words. The participants have to decide “yes or no” that the item was previously seen before (yes) or novel (no) (Cabeza et al., 1997).

According to Pierre Nora, memory can be multiple, yet also specific, collective, plural and individual; it only accommodates facts that suit it and nourishes the recollections that might be particular or symbolic (Nora 9). “Memory is life, borne by living societies founded in its name. It remains in permanent evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting,