ABSTRACT
Considerable difficulties face the thorough investigation of so pervasive a phenomenon as memory, which in its broadest sense comes close to being synonymous with consciousness. Without it the world would be a chaotic mass of meaningless sensations; we would know nothing about our surroundings or ourselves and, bar a few hard-wired reflexes, be unable actually to do virtually anything. Most contemporary researchers in the field, such as Alan Baddeley (1997), acknowledge this. Underpinning everything from perception to personality, motivation to intelligence, memory is not just one, discrete, category of human behaviour or psychological phenomenon. Indeed, outside Psychological laboratory experiments, it rarely manifests itself in isolation – we are invariably remembering for a reason, memory playing a part in our total psychological engagement with our situation, be it sitting an exam, watching a film, or going shopping. When, we may wonder, is memory not involved? As St Augustine acknowledged (see Chapter 9, p. 123), its sheer range is utterly awesome. Today’s psychologists thus identify such sub-varieties as long-and short-term memory (LTM, STM), working memory, episodic memory, linguistic memory, implicit memory, autobiographical memory, visual memory, social or collective memory and recognition (see Table 10.1). Routinely differentiating memory and learning as separate fields of research or as distinct phases of the information acquisition and storage process can be rationalised on theoretical grounds, but perhaps more accurately reflects the historically contingent creation of two distinct research traditions and an attempt to render the whole issue a little more tractable. Where the memorylearning distinction is most convincing is regarding such things as, for example,
Table 10.1 The many types of memory psychologists have identified
(Those in bold have received the most attention from experimental psychologists.) Auditory memory Autobiographical memory Collective memory Echoic memory Episodic memory Implicit memory Long-term memory Recognition* Rote memory Short-term memory Unconscious memory Verbal (or linguistic) memory* Visual memory Working memory
S O M E T O P I C S
routine behaviour and implicit everyday knowledge which require no conscious act of recall, their ultimate dependence on memory only becoming apparent in cases of pathological loss.
