This is the first of a series of posts on psychology. The themes of the post will reflect my personal study of these topics (meant for myself only) and may not be suitable for any serious student (please find more reliable sources) .
Memory : Schacter (1999) outlines 7 "deadly sins " of memory . The first one of them is " Transcience of memory " . Short term and long term memory loss affects all of us .
Exp. 1 Fast Forgetting : Peterson & Peterson -- They asked participants to memorise a three-letter sequence, then count backwards in sets of threes. Participants were then asked to try and recall the three-letter sequence after different lengths of time counting backwards.
Participants did surprisingly poorly on this test. After only six seconds of counting backwards in threes, on average half of the original three letters had disappeared from memory.
It showed that information leaks out from short term memory very quickly.
Long term forgetting is conjectured to follow a power law where the rate at which we forget decreases with time.
All memories are not equal. Cues play an important role in memory . Some scholars speculate that memories are never lost , we just lose the ability to access them. The retrieval and rehearsal of memories has been shown to enhance their storage. Interestingly there's no actual evidence in humans that memories which remain unrehearsed or unretrieved actually do dissipate over time.
The next post will deal with : Absent-mindedness.
Adios.
* I do not make any claims to originality in these psych. posts . They are the amalgamation of my personal study from books and web resources .
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