Understanding Psychology (10th Ed)

 
Looking
Ahead 
While we might think that having perfect recall for all the events 
in our lives would be a blessing, Jill Price’s experience suggests 
otherwise. Her extremely rare condition (called
hyperthymestic 
syndrome
) aff ects the part of her memory that stores experiences 
related to life events. She has perfect, vivid memories of virtually 
every day of her life, memories both good and bad. And while it’s 
pleasant for her to relive her fond memories, she can’t escape the 
pain of the bad ones (Parker, Cahill, & McGaugh, 2006; Price, 
2008). 
Price’s condition illustrates the complexity and the mystery of 
the phenomenon we call memory. Memory allows us to retrieve 
a vast amount of information. We are able to remember the name 
of a friend we haven’t talked with for years and recall the details 
of a picture that hung in our bedroom as a child. At the same 
time, though, memory failures are common. We forget where we 
left the keys to the car and fail to answer an exam question about 
material we studied only a few hours earlier. Why? 
We turn now to the nature of memory, considering the ways 
in which information is stored and retrieved. We examine the 
problems of retrieving information from memory, the accuracy 
of memories, and the reasons information is sometimes forgotten. 
We also consider the biological foundations of memory and 
discuss some practical means of increasing memory capacity.
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You are playing a game of Trivial Pursuit, and winning the game comes down to 
one question: On what body of water is Mumbai located? As you rack your brain 
for the answer, several fundamental processes relating to memory come into play. 
You may never, for instance, have been exposed to information regarding Mumbai’s 
location. Or if you have been exposed to it, it may simply not have registered in a 
meaningful way. In other words, the information might not have been recorded prop-
erly in your memory. The initial process of recording information in a form usable 
to memory, a process called encoding, is the fi rst stage in remembering something. 
Even if you had been exposed to the information and originally knew the name 
of the body of water, you may still be unable to recall it during the game because of 
a failure to retain it. Memory specialists speak of storage, the maintenance of material 
saved in memory. If the material is not stored adequately, it cannot be recalled later. 
Memory also depends on one last process— retrieval : Material in memory storage has 
to be located and brought into awareness to be useful. Your failure to recall Mumbai’s 
location, then, may rest on your inability to retrieve information that you learned earlier. 
In sum, psychologists consider  memory  to be the process by which we encode, 
store, and retrieve information (see Figure 1). Each of the three parts of this defi nition—
encoding, storage, and retrieval—represents a different process. You can think of these 
processes as being analogous to a computer’s keyboard (encoding), hard drive (storage), 
and software that accesses the information for display on the screen (retrieval). Only if 
all three processes have operated will you experience success and be able to recall the 
body of water on which Mumbai is located: the Arabian Sea.
Recognizing that memory involves encoding, storage, and retrieval gives us a start 
in understanding the concept. But how does memory actually function? How do we 
explain what information is initially encoded, what gets stored, and how it is retrieved? 
According to the three-system approach to memory that dominated memory research 
for several decades, there are different memory storage systems or stages through 
which information must travel if it is to be remembered (Atkinson & Shiffrin, 1968, 
1971). Historically, the approach has been extremely infl uential in the development 
of our understanding of memory, and—although new theories have augmented it—
it still provides a useful framework for understanding how information is recalled.