Learning and Memory

To study memory, Ebbinghaus memorized lists of nonsense syllables. He found that success depended on the amount and spacing of trials, and that forgetting occured rapidly at first but then more slowly. He believed that practice strengthens associations, but research on levels of processing showed that practice is not sufficient; deeper and more elaborate processing enhances memory. Similarly, research on textual material demonstrated that we don’t just associate successive words; we abstract and store their underlying meaning. Purely associative accounts also proved unable to explain the acquisition of motor skills; we create motor programs to guide our movements. To understand all these processes, psychologists adopted an information-processing framework, studying how information is coded, stored, and retrieved. Important clues came from two discoveries: that participants can remember only about seven new items at one time, and that these items are forgotten within seconds if rehearsal is prevented. To explain this, Atkinson and Shiffrin proposed that information is initially held in a temporary or short-term store that has only a limited capacity. Their model also accounts for the fact that we remember words from the beginning and end of a list better than from the middle (the serial position effect).