ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews some of the major players in the history of memory research. Memory processes are acts of using information in specific ways to make the information available later or to bring that information back into the stream of processing, the flow of one's thoughts. The terms memory and learning are used in specific ways in psychology. The discovery and study of forms of conditioning are important because for decades they shaped much of the research in learning and memory. The verbal learning tradition was a way to study memory during the anti-mentalistic era of behaviorism. One of the ideas of the Gestalt movement that influences thinking about memory is that the whole is different from the sum of its parts. The standard model of memory, or the modal model, is a heuristic guide for understanding how memory works. This model has four primary components: sensory registers, short-term store, long-term store, and control processes.
