The Importance Of Memory - 1185 Words

Memory plays a crucial role in our lives. Everything we know and much of what we do is because of our memory. Because of its importance, memory has constantly always fascinated researchers. Without our memory, we would have no sense of identity, no idea of who we are. Memory is comprised of all the information that is encoded, stored and can be retrieved when needed. When encoding occurs, information is being processed by the brain. There are multiple types of encoding such as structural (what words look like) , phonemic (what words sound like) and semantic (what words mean). Once the information is processed, it is stored. The sequence of storage goes from sensory memory to short-term memory to long-term memory. In sensory memory, sensory†¦show more content†¦One such psychologist was George Miller (1956). In his experiments, Miller (as cited in Weiten, 2013) asked his participants to repeat a random, unfamiliar list of words. On average, most people listed around seven of the words. Thus, George Miller concluded that people could remember seven unfamiliar items, give or take two items in either direction, in their short-term memory. He also concluded that when new information is introduced, it replaces the old information in the short-term memory storage. Another psychologist, Nelson Cowan determined that the capacity of short term memory is not seven, but it is instead, four with a range of plus or minus one. Cowan believed that past researchers didn’t account for techniques such as chunking, in which multiple units of information are stored as a single unit (Cowan, 2010). These previous studies on the capacity of short-term memory can help researchers decide how many items to put in their experiments to ensure that their results are accurate. Cowan and Miller both focused on the number of items that can be stored in short-term memory at a time, without regards to the amount of information can be stored in each item and how long it takes. Researchers at Harvard University, G.A. Alvarez and P. Cavanagh, conducted an experiment to see whether the amount of information related with each item had an effect on the number of items the participants were able to remember. Their dataShow MoreRelatedThe Importance Of Memory : Importance Of Memory1960 Words   |  8 PagesThe Importance of Memory Memory plays a significant role in a person s everyday life. Actions and emotions are based on the memories that are stored in a person s head. People then act in certain ways because of the thoughts that run around within their brains. These thoughts are born from the memories of past experiences and a person can recognize the emotions they felt when they were in a certain situation. Without these memoires, people would not know how to react under certain circumstancesRead MoreThe Importance of Memory767 Words   |  4 PagesThe importance of memory What will happen if all human lost their memory? What if we can’t remember anything anymore? 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