preview

Long Term Memory Recall

Better Essays

The ability to recall an event is a human attribute that is unconsciously cherished all throughout one’s life. A human’s ability to store and retrieve memories is a complex, and typically misunderstood, process. Although the thought of storing and retrieving a memory seems simple, like accessing information through a filing cabinet, it is much more convoluted, as the ability to remember past experiences requires several complicated processes that take place in the brain. Different types of memories call also for different processes of retrieval, further complicating the location of where the brain stores certain memories and how it recalls these events. The complexity of the human brain, especially involving memory, has been studied since the …show more content…

Sensory memory is the quickest interpretation of one’s surroundings and allows us “to retain impressions...after the original stimuli [has] ended”, maintaining its position in the visual cortex only briefly (Mastin par 1). The storage of this kind of memory is extremely brief, lasting only about “200-500 milliseconds after the perception of an item” (Mastin par 3). Unlike long-term and short-term memory, sensory memory cannot be prolonged or controlled by usand its storage occurs directly as the information is perceived, and then after interpretation, is immediately lost. Sensory memory has the ability to transform into short-term memory “via the process of attention” (Mastin par 6). Short-term memory (STM) can be stored significantly longer than sensory, about “0-30 seconds”, however just like sensory memory, this can be transformed into long-term memory through things like mental repetition (McLeod par 9). The brain’s prefrontal cortex is fundamental in the workings of STM, “[serving] as a temporary store...while it is needed for current reasoning processes” (Mastin par 5). The last time of memory, and most significant, is long-term memory (LTM) Unlike short-term and sensory memory, LTM is unique in that there are no …show more content…

In this method, “remembering a fact, event or object that is not currently physically present and [requiring] the direct uncovering of information from memory” characterizes the basis of recall (Mastin par 5). In contrast to recognition, examples of this would include remembering the name of a recognized person, or answering fill-in the blank questions; here, more knowledge and essentially memory, is needed for the “[reconstruction of] the information and [requiring of] the activation of all the neurons involved in the memory in question” (Mastin par 6). From this, recall can be divided into three main types: free recall, cued recall, and serial recall. Free recall is a process“ in which a person is given a list of items to remember and then is asked to recall them in any order”, displaying the primacy, recency and contiguity effect, which impacts the order in which the items can be remembered within a list (Mastin par 11). Cued recall “is the process in which a person is given a list of items to remember and is then tested with the use of cues or guides”, usually resulting in more memory of information that would not have been possibly to retrieve without a cue (Mastin par 12). Lastly, serial recall “refers to our ability to recall items or events in the order in which they occurred...to make sense of them” (Mastin par 13). Unlike free and cued recall, serial recall is different in that LTM and STM sequences differ. LTM is

Get Access