Hệ thống trí nhớ, quá trình và sự quên

A photograph that fades in a blink

• Flash a grid of letters, then a tone telling you which row to report. You can report almost any row — but only if the tone comes within about a third of a second (Sperling's partial report).
• GRE memory questions test the memory stores, working-memory components, long-term memory types and why we forget.

Stores

• Sensory memory: large, brief (iconic under 1 s; echoic a few seconds). Short-term or working memory: a few chunks for seconds without rehearsal. Long-term memory: durable and vast.
• Chunking 组块 recodes items into familiar units ("FBI CIA USA" is 3 chunks, not 9 letters).

Working memory

• Baddeley: a central executive directing a phonological loop 语音回路 (speech sounds), a visuospatial sketchpad (images) and an episodic buffer (integration).
• Two tasks clash when they use the same component: repeating words disrupts verbal rehearsal more than spatial tracking.

Long-term memory types

• Explicit: episodic (events) and semantic (facts). Implicit: procedural skills, priming, classical conditioning — shown in performance without deliberate recall.
• The serial position curve: primacy (long-term) and recency (still in working memory; lost after a delay).

Forgetting

• Proactive interference 前摄干扰: old learning disrupts new. Retroactive interference: new learning disrupts old.
• Retrieval failure: the cue does not match the encoding context (encoding specificity, context- and state-dependent memory).

Recap