Extras din proiect

I.1 Introduction

The memory can be defined as the the ability of the brain to encode , store and retrive information.The importance of this process can’t be underestimated by any of us.Try only to imagine how life would be without the capacity to remember words , facts , people.Without all this you wold have no identity and no survival skils.Your life would go in cercles , never knowing what happened yesterday , never knowing what will happen tomorrow.

From all the theoretical models that try to explain the way memory works we have chosen the three level memory model elaborated by Rita Atkinson and John Shiffrin.This model has three diferent levels of information storage: the sensory memory , the short –term memory and the long term memory.It’s a model accepted by many psichologysts because it’s based not only on theoretic deductions, but also on true facts and neurological details.

The sensory memories act as buffers for stimuli received through the senses. A sensory memory exists for each sensory channel: iconic memory for visual stimuli, echoic memory for aural stimuli and haptic memory for touch. Information is passed from sensory memory into short-term memory by attention, thereby filtering the stimuli to only those which are of interest at a given time.

Short-term memory acts as a scratch-pad for temporary recall of the information under process. For instance, in order to understand this sentence you need to hold in your mind the beginning of the sentence while you read the rest.

The short-term store has two key characteristics :

1. Very limited capacity—only about 7 digits can be remembered.

2. Fragility of storage—any distraction usually causes forgetting.

Short term memory decays rapidly (200 ms.). Chunking of information can lead to an increase in the short term memory capacity. Thst is the reason why a hyphenated phone number is easier to rememeber than a single long number. The successful formation of a chunk is known as closure. Interference often causes disturbance in short-term memory retention. This accounts for the desire to complete the tasks held in short term memory as soon as possible.

Long-term memory is intended for storage of information over a long time. Information from the working memory is transferred to it after a few seconds. Unlike in working memory, there is little decay.

Long-term memory structure :

There are two types of long-term memory: episodic memory and semantic memory. Episodic memory represents our memory of events and experiences in a serial form. It is from this memory that we can reconstruct the actual events that took place at a given point in our lives. Semantic memory, on the other end, is a structured record of facts, concepts and skills that we have acquired. The information in semantic memory is derived from that in our own episodic memory, such that we can learn new facts or concepts from our experiences.