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Remembering and Forgetting

Do you remember your first day in the school?

On what day did you go to the market last week?

Can you name your friends?

In our everyday life almost all activities in once or the other way deal with memory. Loss of memory means loss of one’s self. Learning will make no sense if it is not retained by the person. It is only through the capacity of memory that we are able to relate to different events, experiences, conditions, people and objects. Also, we use the understanding thus developed in different contexts and on different occasions. Thus, memory makes it possible to operate beyond the constraints of time and place. A child learns something in class and uses it in the market or at home or some other place. Memory establishes links across diverse experiences. It’s a great mental capacity almost magical. It is needed in developing social relationships, mastering cognitive competencies (mental capacities) and solving various problems. There are also occasions when our memory falls and we forget a name, a formula or fail to recognize a person. The study of memory is one of the oldest fields of research in psychology. Psychologists have been studying how our memory works. The factors which increase or decrease our memory capacity, and what can be done to improve memory.

Eyewitness Memory

Human memory as an active process creates a major challenge when we collect eye witness accounts of accidens or other events. People often interpret what they see in terms of what they expect and their memries reflect that. It has been found that we always actively process our memories and try to fit them in the schemata and beliefs that we hold about the situations. It is only hen we look at the overall meaning and context of a memory that we can really judge aout the accuracy of accounts. The details do not constitute the most significant aspect of memory in most of the cases of that kind.

Autobiographical Memory

This kind of memory refers to people’s memory for teir own personal experieces. The studies indicate that autobiographical memory is organized at three different levels. The highest level consists of LIFETIME PERIOD. These are the periods of time in which some aspect of personal life remained reasonably consistent (eg, living with someone, working for a particular organization.) The second level is of GENERAL EVENTS. These are major occurrences covering several days or months (eg, conference, visit or trip. ) The third level is that of EVEN-SPECIFIC KNOWLEDGE. It involves details about a particular event or happening in one’s life. We organize our personal memories across various phases and periods as we go through our lives.

Measurement of Retention

The measurement of memory is undertaken with the help of two types of measures. i.e, EXPLICIT and IMPLICIT.

Explicit Measures

Recall:  In recall a person first learns a list of words. Then he or she is required to recollect the material learned. The number of items correctly recalled becomes the measure of explicit memory. The accuracy of reproduction of the story may provide a measure of explicit memory.

Recognition:  In recognition the learner is presented iwht the prviously learnt items or words mized with new items and his or her job is to identify the previously learned items. Usuall recognition is found to be a more sensitve measure than recall.

Implicit Measures

Word Competion: In this task the learner is presented with fragments of words. The learner is then required to complete the fragmented word. Thus f-sh is a frgamented word.

Priming Task:  In this task earlier background activites (e.g, reading a story) may help to complete frgamnets of words in a particular manner. The background task does priming.

In both of the above mentioned tasks the learner is not explictly asked to remmeber.

CAUSES OF FORGETTING

Memory is a very complex psychological process and any kind of mecanical analogy in terms of storage, processing and retrieval (e.g, tape recorder, compure) falls short. In this process information is retained not only as it is but it may be subjected to change and modification. We often fail to remember due to brain damage, resulting in loss of memory functions, called amnesia. But people do forget in the normal course of life. In fact rememnering and forgetting are both natural proceses subject to a number of factors that operate in everybody’s life.

Understanding the factors of forgetting is helpful to clarif the nature of memory and makin git more effective. Let us examine some of the important factors which have been found critical to retention.

·         Decay of Memory Traces:

·         Interference

·         Motivation

·         Retrieve Failure

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