I Remember When… :: Biology Essays Research Papers

I Remember When This paper was written by a student in a course at Bryn Mawr College, and reflects that students research and thoughts at the duration the paper was written. Like other things on Serendip, the paper is not intended to be authoritative but is instead provided to encourage others to themselves learn about and study through subjects of interest, and, by providing relevant web links, to serve as a window to help them do so. Web links were active as of the clock the paper was posted but are not updated. Theres a standing joke in our family, or rather surrounded by my sister and I. It usually comes up at family get-togethers, about the sentence that were all trying to decide what to do, where to go, or what to eat. Mom will say something like, lets have that spaghetti casserole with turnip greens that I do at last summers get-together, we all enjoyed it so much. Jackie and I will exchange a look that says, gross, we hated that, and invariably Mom, seeing the look pa ss between us, will say in utter seriousness, no, no. I DISTINCTLY REMEMBER. We all loved that casserole. What continually amuses twain Jackie and I, is the degree of confidence with which Mom remembers the kindred event we do, but so differently. How can people be so certain and yet so mistaken about events in our own histories? And yet, it happens time and again, and not just in my family. The observation that episodic memory retrieval is vulnerable to distortion has been documented thoroughly. Even the pattern of errors can be predicted with some reliability. (1) In order to situate episodic memory, its useful to know several distinctions in memory research. The most basic one is between brief and tolerate memories, called short-term memories (STM) (or working memory, WM), and long-term memory (LTM). Within LTM, there are qualitative distinctions, such as between explicit and implicit, and declarative and procedural -- both of these distinctions have to do with consciousness a bout the memory. Explicit/declarative memory encompasses facts, figures, and all of conscious memory. Its what we commonly refer to as memory. (2) This type of memory is flexible, fast, and change for one-time learning. (3) Procedural/implicit memory is thought to be the most durable memory, and encompasses learned habits, skills and things that you know but dont consciously think about.