Psychology 1000 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Long-Term Memory, Sensory Memory, Decay Theory

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 1000
• Professor: John Campbell

Document Summary

Memory refers to the processes that allow us to record and later retrieve experiences and information. Encoding refers to getting information into the system by translating it into a neural code that your brain processes. Retrieval is a way to pull stores of information out when we want to use it. It has been proposed that the memory has three major components: sensory memory, short term or working memory, and long term memory. These terms do not correspond to specific parts in the brain, but more are used in an abstract way. Sensory memory: holds incoming sensory information just long enough for it to be recognized. It is composed of different subsystems, called sensory registers. Our visual system is called the iconic store. The auditory sensory register is called the echoic store. Short-term/ working memory: short term memory holds the information that we are conscious of at any given time.