Publications

Abstract

This chapter presents an overview of the structures and processes of human memory from an information processing perspective. The first section describes the memory systems that play an important role in our explicit memory for experiences (as manifested, e.g., in tasks like recall and recognition). It describes the characteristics of these systems and provides and overview of the various kinds of evidence that establish their separate identities. Section II reviews some major findings about how the flow of information between memory systems is regulated, including encoding and storage, rehearsal, and retrieval. It focuses on the demands these various processes place on limited capacity mechanism(s) and on how the flow of information between different memory systems is controlled. These phenomena are often subsumed under the heading Attention and Memory. The use of the term attention as a theoretical construct will be avoided, however, because the concept is so sprawling and diffuse. Sections III presents a tentative analysis of processes involved in copying information among different memory structures, postulating several distinct forms of attention with specifiably different properties. The aim of this chapter is to provide the reader with a general framework for viewing different memory structures and the information processing operations that modify their contents. Some reader may be surprised to find advocated in this chapter various concepts that some have claimed to be obsolete (e.g., iconic and echoic memory, short-term and long-term memory, central processing bottlenecks). The justification for this will emerge later: recent finding, far from rendering any of these concepts obsolete have markedly strengthened their empirical support. On several other issues, however, especially those pertaining to attention and control, this chapter advocates some markedly unorthodox position, and, questions certain traditional views.