ABSTRACT
It would be foolish to de-emphasize the importance of acquisition of a memory , because a memory's initial storage is so obviously a critical stage in its processing. The present viewpoint emphasizes, however, that it is at least equally useful to consider the processing that occurs afterward and leads to behavioral manifestation-or not-of that memory. This reflects an old message that bears repeating: Once acquired and stored, a memory does not maintain a steady probability of influencing behavior. Rather, accessibility of a memory fluctuates in a lawful manner, sometimes decreasing as the organism encounters sources of forgetting and sometimes increasing as the organism engages in the retrieval process. The focus of this book has been upon such post-acquisition processing of a memory.
