Processes and Types of Memory

Psychologist Dr. Doping talks about place of memory in the system of mental processes, and its potential for subsystems.

Memory refers to the through mental processes, and usually it takes a place of our psychological past, in fact, as he wrote more St. Augustine, "memory links the past with the present and allows to foresee the future."

And memory, unlike other cognitive and through mental processes, is the definition of general scientific and psychological definition. In general scientific sense memory is the ability of the system to change and save the following changes. In this sense, say for example, memory metals, in this sense suggests a genetic memory, or the memory of historical, which is fixed in writing. But in the study of psychology, of course, individual memory, which is usually described by the processes included in its composition. This process of capturing data, it is stored for a certain time and recovering for reuse, because if the information is never removed, we can not say whether it is in the memory of the system or not is stored. In this sense, memory - is a round-trip ticket. Accordingly, the memory is defined as the set of processes of capturing, storing and retrieving information, and, of course, the process of forgetting, erasing the memory traces or inability to retrieve information from memory, which is absolutely inseparable from it.

And in fact, the memory, of course, takes almost a central place in the system of our mental processes: it builds perception, the ability to recognize objects on it based thinking in which our knowledge about how to solve different classes of problems, continuous use . This central storage is reflected even in the Greek mythology, where Mnemosyne was the mother of the nine muses. And near the cave Boeotian oracle had two sources: the source of Lethe, or oblivion, to forget all his past experience, and the memory source, or Mnemosyne, to remember what the oracle says. And if we ask the question "Why do we need a memory?", We can see that it has three global functions can be identified (later we will talk about many small and local functions). But the memory we need to acquire, store and use personal experience to absorb, again, save, and upload on social experience, and finally, to ensure that we were the same people over throughout life, in order to maintain the unity of our personality. Maintaining the unity of the personality takes place thanks to the memory processes, which we have named.

But within these processes, we can also highlight a number of different varieties. If a storage psychology has little to say, that is, it can assume the form in which information is stored, how long it is retained in the memory system, the extraction processes are very different and vary in their degree of involvement in the knowing subject.

Processes can be extremely active, such as the reconstruction process, or restore some of the story we have heard or events of our past life. Or too active processes literal reproduction or reproduction, when we, for example, learn a poem or identification and must exactly reproduce it. A little less active, but requiring our participation events referring to the processes of our biography or association, when we remember that when something happened to us-so that the first time we read it then that such a book.

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Even less activity is required in our recognition processes. When we meet on the street person and understand that it is our old friend Bob, it seems that it happens by itself, and with it the process of memory retrieval. Finally, most of us less dependent on process, most favored by psychologists in the study of memory - a process of re-learning, when we learn something for the second time, we need to spend a lot less time and effort than the first memorization. And it is also due to the fact that the memory contains traces of previous learning: even five years later, after we have learned a fragment from the poem "Eugene Onegin", we do not remember anything, only one or two readings, and our memory helpfully throws it, that was stored in it.

Of course, memory - the phenomenon is very diverse, it is possible to allocate a lot of species, but it also needed some justification for the classification. Most coming to mind the basis for the allocation of types of memory - this is the material that we remember. And the material, followed by domestic psychologist Pavel Petrovich Blonsky (though the West were also similar classification), you can allocate the motor or motor related to the conservation and recovery of certain sequences of movements, usually in the form of skills; memory of emotional or affective associated with preservation of emotional experiences associated with that or other effects; shaped memory associated, respectively, with storage and storage-modal images, not necessarily visual, auditory or olfactory possible; and finally, verbal memory, or verbal or memory-story associated with the storage of information in the form of stories that can be expressed in words.

In fact, it is not only the memory types, but also the stage of its development - the development in the phylogeny (history of human development as a species) and ontogeny in the individual development. Memory of the motor or motor, in the form of addiction have already been in the simplest. Ciliate-shoes, which is used to float in the vessel a certain shape, being transplanted into another vessel, reproduces the old path for some time. Affective memory has already precisely in the earthworm: it is possible to "punish" the current blows, so it does not crawl in a certain direction. After a while it ceases to crawl, presumably linking this change with a sense of pain. Memory has shaped exactly in animals. For example, about monkeys is certain that if the show monkey banana, as did the researcher Tinklpou names, hide it behind a screen and replace banana cabbages that monkey also eats in principle, the monkey, he ran behind the screen will look there banana, ignoring cabbage. Consequently, the image of the object in some way in the memory is retained. Memory verbal, or the memory-story appears only in humans, and the child begins to develop along with the development of speech, first in the form of the desire to share with my mother what was happening to him in her absence, and is gradually becoming, in fact, the leading form memory.

In addition, you can select types of memory by the presence of goals is something to remember. If such a goal is, the memory is called random. That's about it, we say, especially when something we teach or try to remember a phone number, and so on. If you do not have to remember the goal, but we still remember, this memory will be called involuntary. For example, we met some unusual characters in the underground, it is not tried to remember his appearance, but well remember what he looked like. Or read a fascinating book, closed it and remember the brightest, the most interesting scenes, although they are not specifically memorized. Usually involuntary memory due to the fact that a particular object has been the subject of our activities, we had something to do, or what he called, we have a particularly vivid experience.

Further, we can distinguish between types of memory for the use of certain means of remembering. On the one hand, the memory can be direct, when we do not use any special means for storing anything was. For example, we teach the heart to tell the poem as a sequence of syllables or movements or phone number, or develop a certain motor skill. And if we use some means for storing, or a so-called mnemonics, such storage will be, respectively, mediated. Mediation can be both external, when we, for example, tying the knot in the scarf or draw a cross on the hand, not to forget to execute someone's order, and internal, when we, for example, group the phone number, selecting it meaningful combinations numbers, for example someone's date of birth, when trying to rhyme shopping list or figuratively to imagine how we are placed on the shelf in the closet and then collect there.

And finally, in modern cognitive psychology, the most common classification is based on the information storage time and at the same time on the functions of one system or another, or that kind of memory. Cognitive psychologists distinguish the memory of ultra-short-time, the so-called touch-sensitive, where the information is kept in the same form as received on the senses. In the visual modality of about half a second is enough to blink and do not miss. Why did not we notice that blink 12 times per minute? Just because of this sensory register, or iconic memory. The auditory sensory register information is kept a little longer - from two to four seconds, because it is linked to the need to perceive and understand detailed time speech.

In addition to the sensory register, or ultra-short-time memory, recovered memory short and long term. Short-time memory is connected with the provision of solving current problems - for example, to remember a phone number, which we have just said, and to call on it, after which it can be forgotten, either execute in mind the multiplication of two-digit numbers, hold the intermediate results. In this system, which not only has limitations during storage, but also on the amount of information, if it is not repeating stored somewhere to 30 seconds. But, if we repeat something, we can hold it indefinitely, until they cease to do so or until the information will not go to another subsystem, corresponding to the following form of memory - long-term, where information can be stored indefinitely, and in general has not been proved, that she was there ever was disappearing or erased.

Long-term memory as the time we need in order to accumulate and use the experience to keep the unity of the person, but it is also possible to distinguish between different subsystems. For example, Larry Squire proposes to distinguish memory declarative, or the memory of the "what" ( "I know that Moscow is the capital of Russia", "I know I went to work yesterday"), and procedural, or the memory of the "how" ( "I know how to ride a bike "or" how to work the computer "). In turn, the memory subsystem of the declarative psychologist Endel Tulving offers divided into semantic memory, which stores a variety of common knowledge, facts, and so on, and episodic memory, which stores the events of our experience, our life, arrayed along the time axis. Accordingly, it turns out that in the long-term memory, there are three sub-systems: semantic, episodic and procedural, that we can conditionally compare with a dictionary or an encyclopedia, a personal diary, and instructions for use.