Which step of memory involves holding onto information for some period of time?

Cognitive Psychology of Memory

N. Cowan, in Learning and Memory: A Comprehensive Reference, 2008

Sensory memory is a mental representation of how environmental events look, sound, feel, smell and taste. It includes a long-term component useful for such activities as recognizing a color or a familiar voice. However, most vivid details of sensory memory seem to fade quickly. Based on a long history of research, this chapter examines defining characteristics of sensory memory, reasons to study it, techniques to examine it, and theories of sensory memory forgetting. This memory is especially important for a scientific understanding of consciousness, for an understanding of individual differences, and as a control in understanding conceptual aspects of memory.

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Aging: Brain Potential Measures and Reaction Time Studies

E. Golob, ... A. Starr, in Encyclopedia of Neuroscience, 2009

Sensory Memory

Sensory memory is a relatively automatic form of memory and has a duration of several seconds. In the auditory modality sensory memory is important for the perception of speech and various aspects of auditory scene perception. The mismatch negativity (MMN) is an ERP that has been extensively used to study sensory memory (Figures 1(c) and 1(d)). The MMN is elicited by a stimulus that deviates from a previously established pattern of stimuli presented sequentially. The rationale for its use is that sensory memory can be probed by first establishing a standard sensory memory representation and then presenting a stimulus that is predicted to differ from the sensory memory representation in some respect. If the MMN is elicited, it can be inferred that the deviant aspect of the stimulus was not a property of the standard stimulus representation (mismatch). It is a way to infer memory representations by defining the ‘limits’ of the sensory memory representation, after which a stimulus is considered different.

Studies of the MMN in normal aging consistently report that when the deviant stimulus differs from the standard in terms of acoustic properties such as frequency or intensity, there are little or no age differences. However, if deviant stimuli differ in terms of timing, such as stimulus duration or interstimulus interval, then age differences are often evident, with smaller MMN amplitudes in older compared to young subjects.

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Sensory and Immediate Memory

N. Cowan, in Encyclopedia of Consciousness, 2009

Sensory memory is recollection of perceptual types of how a stimulus looks, feels, sounds, etc. Immediate memory (including, but not limited to, sensory memory) is recollection of a small amount of information for a brief time; it is used to carry out cognitive tasks. Two key immediate-memory mechanisms are (1) activated sensory and conceptual features from long-term memory, with a short time limit to this activation; and (2) the subset of activated information that is in the focus of attention, with a limit to how many items can be in focus at once. These memory mechanisms may underlie conscious phenomena like the perceptual moment and the psychological present.

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Memory

Krishnagopal Dharani, in The Biology of Thought, 2015

Short-Term Memory

Sensory memory thus formed may end up in two ways: it can be registered as STM; or it may be lost from consciousness forever (Fig. 3.4). The STM thus formed may also end up in two ways it may pass into long-term memory; or may vanish totally. For example, when we look at a number in the telephone directory before starting to dial, the number is temporarily stored for a few seconds and after completing the task it will vanish from our memory (unless a conscious effort is made to remember it, then it becomes LTM). The duration of STM storage ranges between 10 and 12 seconds. Studies have shown that a human being has the capacity to remember about 7±2 items at a given moment (‘the magical number seven’). It is common knowledge that the fate of STM depends on the attention the perceiver pays – if no attention is paid the memory decays; if conscious effort is made it forms LTM. STM is acclaimed to be processed in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) (see Ch. 1, p. 11).

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A useful framework

In Fundamentals of Cognitive Neuroscience, 2013

3.3 What is not lost?

Sensory and working memory are needed even for the simplest activities. If you cannot remember the beginning of this sentence, you cannot understand its ending. Because a sentence takes several seconds to read, you must be holding information for that time. Similarly, if your brain cannot store information from one visual fixation to the next, you cannot put the separate snapshots together into a whole visual scene. Finally, if you need to eat, but you can't keep your feeling of hunger in mind long enough do something about it, you may go without food. All your sensory, motor, and cognitive functions need some immediate memory to work.

The hippocampal region continues to be an active topic of research. Because it is part of the ancient mammalian brain, it has many different functions. The surrounding medial temporal lobe is also an area of great convergence between different sense modalities.

The hippocampal regions themselves are called paleocortex, or “old cortex.” While neocortex has six distinct cellular layers, paleocortex has four or five. In humans and other mammals, the hippocampal region is in constant dialogue with the neocortex to encode, maintain, and retrieve memories when needed.

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Stress, Trauma, and Memory in PTSD

J. Nursey, A.J. Phelps, in Stress: Concepts, Cognition, Emotion, and Behavior, 2016

Sensory memory is the perception of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch information entering through the sensory cortices of the brain and relaying through the thalamus. It lasts only milliseconds and is mostly outside conscious awareness.27

Immediate or short-term memory is our capacity to hold a very limited amount of information in a temporary buffer for a short period of time (from a few seconds to a couple of minutes). The information enters through auditory or visual channels and captures our attention. The average adult can hold between seven and nine pieces of information in short-term memory before it becomes overloaded.

Working memory refers to our ability to manipulate and make use of the information held in short-term memory, for example calculating the change you should get back from a shopkeeper or reading and recalling a phone number while you dial. Information only stays in our working memory buffer for a couple of minutes. Working memory is comprised of two parts, the phonological loop that processes verbal information and the visuospatial sketch pad that handles visual information, coordinated by a central executive system.34 Working memory relies on a network of interconnected brain regions, however the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex plays a fundamental role in working memory.

Long-term memory refers to information that is stored over a period of days, months, or years. There are two streams of long-term memory—declarative and nondeclarative. Declarative or explicit memory stores facts and events that are available to our conscious recall. It relies on the medial temporal lobe including the hippocampus and its connections to adjacent structures such as the parahippocampal gyrus, the entorhinal cortex, and the limbic system to facilitate the encoding and consolidation of new information. Declarative memory can be further broken down into two subsystems known as episodic and semantic memory.

Episodic memory contains memories of events and facts in our daily life, for example what we had for dinner last night. Episodic memory stores the autobiographical details of our life and is always self-referential. Semantic memory stores knowledge that we acquire about the world, including things such as word meanings, general knowledge, rules, concepts, and customs. Semantic memory involves structures such as the cerebellum, basal ganglia, amygdala, and the neocortex.35

Nondeclarative or implicit memory includes behaviors, skills, and knowledge learned through unconscious processes such as conditioning, habituation, priming, and procedural learning. It is not available for conscious recall. Examples of implicit memory include fear conditioning and procedural memory.

Emotional memory: Emotional experiences enhance both the encoding of new memories as well as their ability to be retrieved. Memories associated with strong emotions are known as emotional memory. Emotional memories can be both implicit (unconsciously encoded and retrieved) or explicit (consciously mediated). The amygdala is central to both the encoding and retrieval of emotional memories, however both the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex also play important roles.

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Basic psychology

Jeremy Hall, Mary E. Stewart, in Companion to Psychiatric Studies (Eighth Edition), 2010

Types of memory

Memory can be broadly divided into sensory memory, working memory and long-term memory. Sensory memory consists of sensory information retained in an unprocessed form in the sensory system through which it entered. This form of memory is short lived (0.5–3 seconds) but has a large capacity. Sensory memory accounts for our ability to recall something after it was spoken, even if it was not originally the subject of attention. Sensory memory has therefore saved many marriages.

Working memory is also often referred to as short-term memory. The latter term is, however, often used very differently by clinicians, psychologists and researchers and therefore the term working memory is to be preferred. Working memory is a temporary store of a subset of sensory information to which attention has been applied. It is generally considered to have its substrate in the frontal lobes and cortical areas concerned with sensory processing. Working memory has a limited capacity, typically described as comprising seven plus or minus two items, and a short duration of approximately 30 seconds maximum. The capacity of working memory can, however, be extended by the process of chunking, in which several items are grouped together into a single cognitive unit. For example, my telephone number consists of seven digits. If I tell this number to someone who did not previously know it, it will require all their working memory capacity to remember the seven digits. However, for me this telephone number is a single cognitive unit and therefore through the process of chunking it only occupies one item or unit in my working memory. The duration of working memory can also be extended by the process of rehearsal in which auditory items are repeated mentally to keep them in working memory for longer than 30 seconds. This process means that when testing longer term memory it is important to provide some form of cognitive distraction between encoding and retrieval to prevent the subject simply rehearsing the to-be-remembered items in working memory.

Long-term memory is theoretically unlimited in capacity and permanent in duration. The concept of memory having unlimited capacity may seem strange, however, the capacity of human memory has never clearly been exceeded (there are no examples of people being unable to remember more information due to ‘overload’) and there is not even evidence of asymptotic slowing of the ability to acquire new memories. Long-term memory can be divided into explicit memory and implicit memory. Explicit memories are conscious memories that can be brought to mind and described or spoken. They include episodic memory, which is the complex memory for episodes and events in one's life, and semantic memory, which is memory for facts such as the meaning of words and general knowledge. Implicit memories are outside conscious awareness and include memories for procedures, such how to ride a bicycle, as well as conditioning and priming. Long-term memory involves a number of brain regions. The hippocampus and limbic brain regions are known to play a key role in episodic memory, while the temporal neocortex is an important substrate for semantic memory. Procedural memories in contrast are known to depend upon the basal ganglia and associated motor circuitry.

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Evidence-Based Practice with Alzheimer’s Disease and Dementia

Morley D. Glicken DSW, in Evidence-Based Counseling and Psychotherapy for an Aging Population, 2009

15.3 Diagnosis

There are several distinct types of memory: sensory, short-term, working, and long-term. Sensory memory is fleeting unless we pay attention to it. Short-term memory serves as a temporary holding tank for things that we do pay some attention to, but it has limited storage capacity. Interference frequently disrupts short-term memory. Working memory is also a limited area, but it allows us to hold and store information while we are processing or reasoning various steps. Long-term memory, which endures for more than 30 seconds, is either declarative (involving facts and events available through conscious recall), semantic (independent of context), or episodic (highly contextual). No one area of the brain is entirely responsible for memory, since this complex process involves various parts of the brain, depending on the type of memory, the emotional content, and the perceiving, processing, and analyzing necessary for the memory. The brain’s nerve cells (neurons) communicate with each other, providing important transmission of signals which are responsible for complex tasks and processing (www.alz.org). The firing of synapses (neurons being transmitted) is a part of the brain’s memory process. Different synapses work differently for short- and long-term memory (National Institute on Aging, 2008.)

In AD, the neurons are unable to connect signals due to a build up of plaque between brain cells and tangles within brain cells. This development of plaque and tangles is the hallmark of AD, but diagnosis has been difficult, as the tangles are not readily evident. Early stage and early onset AD manifests itself as problems with memory, thinking, and concentration. People with AD may also exhibit physical and verbal outbursts, emotional distress, pacing, restlessness, hallucinations, and delusions. AD is usually diagnosed after ruling out other physical and medical causes, assessing cognitive functioning through such tests as the Mini Mental Status Examination (MMSE), and various brain scans. However, the MMSE is not always accurate, making the definitive diagnoses of AD more difficult (Shiroky et al., 2007).

The diagnosis of AD is disturbing for its terminal prognosis (albeit slow) and for the multiple losses that ensue. Early onset AD has certain genetic features, and recent developments in DNA testing (using genotype tests) may be useful in determining the existence of AD and the presence of apolipoprotein E (APOE), which is a marker for AD (Nee et al., 2004).

Children of AD patients have a higher-than-average risk of developing dementia, suggesting a genetic predisposition (Grady, 2007). Grady also notes that studies of IQ early in life indicate that people who develop AD have lower scores on early tests than healthy people, and that therefore AD may develop early in life and progress slowly until symptoms become more obvious, sometimes in early mid-life. The good news is that early detection of AD and understanding risk factors may lead to therapies that slow and even stop brain deterioration.

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Sensational Memorability

Nelson Cowan, in Mechanisms of Sensory Working Memory, 2015

Processed Sensory Recollection

It seems to me that the field of sensory memory has always been the source of much confusion, largely because different procedures yield very different estimates of sensory memory. Whereas Sperling (1960) showed that there was a type of visual sensory memory lasting several hundred milliseconds, a much longer estimate of acoustic memory was obtained in a procedure similar to Sperling but using spatiotemporal arrays of spoken digits (Darwin et al., 1972). Characters were spoken at left, center, and right locations concurrently in two successive temporal bursts for a total of six characters to be remembered per trial. A cue indicated which spatial location to recall. The finding was that sensory information took a lot longer to decline to a plateau than was found in vision: about 4 s. On the basis of this finding, it has often been argued that sensory information lasts a lot longer in the acoustic domain than in vision.

This interpretation of Darwin et al. (1972) as indicating a modality difference, however, would leave no explanation for the comparable results obtained for visual and acoustic stimuli by Efron (1970a, 1970b, 1970c), so there is a conundrum. The solution may be as follows. Results obtained by Massaro (1976) following up on Darwin et al. suggest that their sort of finding in the auditory domain is not comparable to what was obtained in the visual domain by Sperling. In vision, a postarray category cue (e.g., recall all letters but not numbers in the array) cannot be used to access a part of the sensory representation as efficiently as a postarray physical cue (e.g., recall the middle row). Yet, Massaro found that physical and category postarray cues worked equally well in audition. Darwin et al. carried out a comparable experiment with semantic cueing (their Experiment III) but it is difficult to compare with physical cueing because the whole-report results in these two experiments differ substantially for some reason. Overall, I conclude, with Massaro, that the ability to use the longer memory for acoustic stimuli may make this technique incapable of demonstrating the shorter memory of the type examined by Efron and others, and that there are two phases of sensory memory in each modality, with different time courses and characteristics (Cowan, 1984, 1988). It still remains to be discussed why the longer store does not similarly interfere with the findings in the visual modality.

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Working Memory and Aging

Monica Fabiani, ... Gabriele Gratton, in Mechanisms of Sensory Working Memory, 2015

Abstract

In this chapter, we review research on the sensory and working memory changes that typically accompany normal aging, with the view that an examination of individual differences over the lifespan can illuminate some of the mechanisms underlying working memory processes. We also discuss the theoretical frameworks used to interpret these age-related changes and provide an integrated view encompassing both behavioral and brain imaging data. Behavioral data show age-related changes in both the maintenance and attention-control aspects of working memory, suggesting a balance change between the top-down and bottom-up processing streams. Brain imaging studies provide evidence for anatomical and functional changes in the brain networks associated with working memory and the top-down control of attention.

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What is the process of holding information in your memory?

Psychologists distinguish between three necessary stages in the learning and memory process: encoding, storage, and retrieval (Melton, 1963). Encoding is defined as the initial learning of information; storage refers to maintaining information over time; retrieval is the ability to access information when you need it.

What are the 4 steps of memory?

Stages of Memory.
Memory Encoding. Memory Encoding. When information comes into our memory system (from sensory input), it needs to be changed into a form that the system can cope with, so that it can be stored. ... .
Memory Storage. Memory Storage. ... .
Memory Retrieval. Memory Retrieval..

What are the steps to process information into memory?

There are three main processes that characterize how memory works. These processes are encoding, storage, and retrieval (or recall)..
Encoding. Encoding refers to the process through which information is learned. ... .
Storage. ... .
Retrieval..

What are the 3 stages of memory?

Stages of Memory Creation The brain has three types of memory processes: sensory register, short-term memory, and long-term memory.