ABSTRACT
Throughout the course o f an individual's lifetime, information is acquired, stored, and may be used again and again, often with continuing modifications. Behavior at any moment that seems to be influenced by preceding events can be said to be influenced by memory fo r those preceding events. Obviously, some kinds o f information are more likely to be relatively unchanging over time, while others may vary greatly from moment to moment. The colors o f the flag o f the United States, fo r example, can be expected to be quite invariant over the life o f an individual, while other kinds o f information, such as the calendar date fo r yesterday, are constantly changing. Still other information, such as the name o f the current president o f the United States, changes at a rate intermediate to that o f the two previous examples. It is likely, then, that memorability might be largely influenced by the relative stability or variability o f the information to be remembered. What I wish to do in this paper is to review some selected work in animal and human memory deficits, to consider whether there are close links in the underlying functional and neural mechanisms studied in these tw o sometimes separate literatures, and to propose an approach which emphasizes how an appreciation o f the relative stability and variability with which information is stored can be useful in advancing our understanding o f the role of memory in information processing.
