What is the basic principle of long-term memory?

Human memory includes long-term memory, short-term memory and instantaneous memory. Here is the long-term memory of the brain. Come and have a look with me!

Basic principles of long-term memory

Long-term memory refers to the memory that remains in the mind for a long time after the learning materials are reviewed or carefully retelled.

Long-term memory is a real information base, and its memory capacity seems to be unlimited. It can store all one's knowledge about the world and provide the necessary knowledge base for all his activities. People never feel that they remember too much in the past, but now they can't remember at all. Obviously, it has a large capacity.

Long-term memory retains present information for future use, or extracts information stored in the past for present use. It relates the past, present and future of human activities. Its information mainly comes from the retelling of short-term memory contents. Some perceptually impressive contents are printed at one time, especially those exciting and causing strong emotional experience, which can be directly stored in the long-term memory system.

The information in long-term memory is kept for more than 1 minute, even for several years or even for life, which is a long-term storage.

Experts point out that rote memorization is the main way to remember information for a long time. As the saying goes, if you want to remember, you must remember first. Only by perceiving or repeatedly perceiving, thinking, experiencing and operating external information, and carrying out sufficient and in-depth psychological processing, can we keep it in our minds for a long time. According to whether the subjects have a clear intention and purpose of memorizing and whether they will make efforts, memorization can be divided into unconscious memorization and conscious memorization.

Unconscious memorization, also known as unconscious memorization, means that the subject has no intention and purpose of memorizing beforehand, and does not need to make special efforts, let alone adopt any memorizing strategies and means. Information is naturally integrated into long-term memory.

Unconscious memory is closely related to people's occupation, interest, motivation and needs. Events that are significant, interesting and can stimulate people's emotions are often inadvertently remembered.

In daily life, people unconsciously accept a lot of knowledge and accumulate a lot of experience. Unconscious memory has great contingency and selectivity, and the content of memory is random. Therefore, it is impossible for people to acquire systematic scientific knowledge only by unconscious reciting. Because unconscious memory can reduce people's mental work and remember many useful things, it is worth studying and developing vigorously.

Conscious memory, also called conscious memory, refers to the memory with a predetermined purpose, using certain strategies and methods, and through special efforts. Conscious memory has a clear purpose, specific tasks and flexible methods, accompanied by positive thinking activities and will efforts. Therefore, it is an active and conscious memory activity. People master systematic scientific knowledge and skills mainly through conscious memory, which plays a leading role in study and work.

The effect of memory depends on subjective and objective factors.

Rote memorization is the only way to acquire knowledge and accumulate experience. To improve the efficiency of memory, we must first have a good memory. As long as we pay attention to methods and respect the laws of memory, we can achieve twice the result with half the effort, and the effect of memory depends on subjective and objective factors.

As far as the subject is concerned, first of all, whether there is a clear purpose and task of memorizing, whether there is a strong desire for learning and pure motivation are the decisive factors that affect the memorizing effect. Secondly, the more you understand the material in memorization, the better the memory effect. Therefore, strengthening the understanding of memory materials is the key to long-term maintenance. To do this, we should first try our best to understand the materials that are meaningfully related to the existing knowledge and experience, and adopt the meaning memory method. Secondly, meaningless contact materials are endowed with artificial meaning, that is, meaningless contact materials are meaningful and subjectively organized and recoded, which will help to store and maintain.

According to whether the material to be memorized is meaningful or whether the learner understands its meaning, memory can be divided into mechanical memory and meaningful memory.

Mechanical memory refers to memorizing meaningless materials or things by mechanical repetition only according to the external relationship of things. For example, remember people's names, place names, telephone numbers, product models, historical years and so on. There is no internal connection between the materials themselves, and they can only be memorized according to the external time and space order as far as possible. Some materials themselves have certain meanings, but it is difficult to understand their meanings because of the learners' knowledge level and experience. In this case, mechanical memory has to be adopted.

The advantage of mechanical memory is to ensure the accuracy of memory materials, but the disadvantage is that it consumes a lot of time and energy. Because there is little intellectual processing of materials, the overall effect is not as good as the meaning. Nevertheless, this memory is still indispensable. Because in real life, there are always some meaningless materials that we need to remember.

Meaning memory refers to the memory of memory materials based on understanding the internal relations of memory objects and things and using existing knowledge and experience. The premise of memorizing meaning is understanding, and understanding is carried out through thinking. For example, understanding the meaning of a word, clarifying a scientific concept, understanding the origin and derivation of formulas, and grasping the central idea of the text all belong to understanding. Only by understanding the meaning of the material itself, and connecting it with the existing knowledge and experience, and incorporating it into the existing knowledge system, can it be preserved in memory. The advantages of this kind of rote learning are easy to remember, keep for a long time and easy to extract. The disadvantage is that the memory is not necessarily accurate. However, in terms of comprehensiveness, speed and firmness, meaning memory is better than mechanical memory.

Meaning memory and mechanical memory are different in nature, but they are not antagonistic and exclusive, but interdependent and complementary. Meaning memory relies on the supplement of mechanical memory to achieve the accuracy and memory of materials; Mechanical memory also needs the help and guidance of meaningful memory. In order to remember those materials that lack internal connection more effectively, we can artificially give these materials some connections to make them meaningful, thus enhancing the memory effect.

For example, the height of a mountain is 12365 feet, which can be recorded as the month and day of the year. Einstein still remembers his girlfriend's phone number? 2436 1? When, just use it? Two dozen plus 19 squared? On the road of meaning.

It can be seen that no matter what kind of materials are memorized, coding and intellectual processing are needed, which is beneficial to long-term storage.

Common tissue processing methods of memory materials

The so-called tissue processing is to integrate materials, bring new materials into the existing knowledge structure, or combine materials into a new knowledge framework as a combined unit. This process is called tissue processing. Memory materials can be processed in many ways. The following are several common treatment methods summarized by relevant scholars.

Representation and Semantic dual coding theory

1975, American psychologist pevo put forward dual coding theory in long-term memory. He believes that remembering a specific thing will lead to the double coding of representation and semantics. Watch, for example, can not only be expressed by the psychological image of a watch with a specific shape, but also be described as a timing tool in a more abstract and general sense? . The former is representation coding and the latter is semantic coding.

When people remember a specific thing, they always draw its meaning from it besides remembering its visual image. This fully proves that double coding exists objectively. Representation and semantics are parallel and related cognitive systems, which can be activated by related stimuli respectively. However, these two kinds of information can be transformed into each other. However, by memorizing those abstract concepts and ideas, it is difficult to represent them with representation codes, such as? Is it fair? 、? The truth? Wait, we can only use semantics to encode, understand and analyze its meaning, and grasp its essence to facilitate memory.

How information is processed and encoded when it is transferred from short-term memory to long-term memory is closely related to the nature of the material itself and the personality characteristics of the subjects.

As far as language materials are concerned, semantic coding is used more. For example, when reading an article or listening to a report, what is ultimately preserved is its meaning, not the storage of a word. For some discrete language materials, people also use natural language as the medium of long-term memory coding, establish some meaningful connections between memory materials, and then memorize them.

Like the back? Girls? 、? Birds? 、? Forest? 、? Singing? Four words, these discrete words can be reprocessed into:? A girl is listening to birds singing in the forest? . With meaning, it is easy to remember. It is equivalent to the chunking phenomenon in short-term memory, but this information processing in long-term memory is called? Organization? No? Big chunks? Express delivery.

Organization and Processing of Media by Natural Language

When learning loanwords, we can first find similar words from our natural language as the medium of semantic coding according to their pronunciation and meaning, and then extract prepositions and decode them when we recall, so that the original words can be reproduced.

For example, when memorizing meaningless syllables, it will be easier to remember them by using similar words and taking meaning as the intermediary. Now, it is required to remember: jontoltatyurirlokveynic 8 meaningless syllables, if they are associated with close words, such as Johntoldthattyourhairokedverynice, and can be memorized as a sentence, does John tell you that your hairstyle looks beautiful? . In this way, the tissue processing of memory materials by natural language is helpful for long-term storage.

Organizational processing based on semantic classification

When people remember a series of concepts, they don't remember them in the order of appearance, but first classify them semantically, and tend to remember similar concepts in groups. This processing tendency can be seen in the experiment of free memory.

For example, 24 pairs of closely related words (such as doctor and teacher, desk and chair, horse and sheep, etc. ) was broken down into 48 words and presented to the subjects one by one in a random way, allowing them to recall freely. The results show that the subjects still tend to reproduce words with close semantic connection together. Although the words table and chair are separated by 17, they are still organized together when they are recalled. The closer the semantic connection between words, the higher the percentage of correct recall. This shows that knowledge systematization plays an important role in the organization and processing of information.

Subjective organization

For materials that have no meaningful connection, organize them manually, and reproduce the processed materials in clusters when recalling them. This process is called subjective organization.

1962 e？ In the experiment, Turvin presented 16 unrelated words to the subjects, such as music, barracks, discovery, iceberg, office, valley, naughty, girl, cycle, jungle, riddle, traitor, saltwater lake, motto, hair oil and pedestrian. These 16 words are arranged in 16 different orders, each order is presented to the subjects once, and one word is presented every second, and this is repeated many times, so that the subjects can reproduce it in their favorite order.

The results show that the subjects tend to reproduce the words in the same order in continuous experiments, and the more they combine some words together, the higher their subjective organization.

Tissue processing mediated by visual representation of double joint method

The dual union method was put forward by Calkins at the end of 19. In the double joint test, subjects are presented with two matched items, which are called stimulus and response respectively. The procedure of double joint recall is usually to present a series of stimulus-response pairs to the subjects first, and then present the stimulus items separately, so that the subjects can recall the corresponding response items to test their learning and memory effects.

During the period of 1972, Bauer carried out the learning experiment of dual combination. He asked one group of subjects to form visual representations as much as possible when they saw double words, but did not give this hint to another group of subjects. Results The correct recall of the first group was higher than that of the second group (1? Five times. Like the back? Cigarettes, dogs, hats, bicycles, police, batons? In the process of waiting for a string of words, the subjects processed such a visual image: a policeman stopped a dog wearing a hat and smoking on a bicycle with a baton. In this way, when the cigarette stimulus appears, the subjects can think of five other words from the visual image. It can be seen that the processed tissue mediated by visual representation is also an effective memory code.

Storage of Long-term Memory and Its Possible Changes

There is an important word in the research of memory psychology:? Keep? . Memory refers to the process of storing and consolidating information that has been memorized in the mind. Retention is not only an important symbol of memory, but also an important condition for memory and recognition.

The information is encoded and stored in the brain. Although this kind of storage is orderly and hierarchical, it cannot be understood as unchangeable as the files stored in the safe. Keeping information in memory is a potential dynamic process, which will change qualitatively and quantitatively with the passage of time and the influence of later experience.

1932, British psychologist bartlett did an experiment. He asked the subjects to try to draw a picture, and after half an hour, he was asked to draw it from memory; Then, show what he drew to the second subject, and after half an hour, let the second subject draw this picture from memory; Do it in turn until section 18. The owl remembered by the first subject changed into the image of a cat after 18 memories. Such a big gap shows that the storage of information in the brain is not static, but will change.

With the passage of time, the recorded information has undergone qualitative changes, showing the following characteristics:

First, the content of memory is simpler and more general than the original recitation; Some unimportant details often disappear, while the main content and salient features are preserved.

Second, the retained content is more detailed, specific, complete and reasonable than the original recitation.

The third is to make some features in the original memorization more prominent, exaggerated or distorted, and become more vivid, bizarre and distinctive.

l？ Carmelo and others did an experiment that was regarded as a classic. They asked the subjects to watch a series of stimulating graphics in a short time. The first group of subjects heard the names in the left row while looking at the pictures. The second group hears the name of the row on the right. After the graphics are presented, let the two groups of subjects draw the graphics they see. As a result, about 3/4 of the subjects drew pictures more like the names they heard, which proved the influence of stereotypes on memory. Not only the content of image memory may be transformed or even distorted in the process of preservation, but also the preservation of written materials.

In another experiment, bartlett asked many subjects to read an article? The devil's war? After a while, let them repeat the story. The results show that the subjects who often read ghost stories add a lot of contents and details about ghosts in their memories, while the subjects who have received logic training delete many descriptions about ghosts in their memories, making the stories more logical.

From the difference between memory content and recall content, we can see that the retention of information in the mind is not static and solidified, but a process of reconstruction. Is the content of memory thought in the process of keeping? Editing? Processing, or make it more concise, or more complete and reasonable, or supplemented by imagination and more detailed and vivid, or exaggerated.

With the passage of time, the information that has been memorized has changed in quantity, showing two tendencies: one tendency is that the amount of memory is decreasing with the passage of time, and some memories are not remembered or are wrong, which is called forgetting; The other is the phenomenon of memory rebound, that is, the recovery of memory.

In an experiment of 19 13, Ballard asked students aged around 12 to memorize a poem in 15 minutes, and measured their memory immediately after learning, and set the average recall rate to 100%. After that, on the first, second, third, fourth, fifth and sixth days, the retention was measured again, and it was found that the performance of immediate recall after memory was not as good as that after two or three days. This phenomenon has been confirmed by many people's research. Children are more common than adults, and materials that are difficult to learn are more meaningful than those that are easy to learn.

The content of memory recovery is mostly in the middle of learning materials, which may be due to the accumulation of inhibition in the process of memorizing complex materials, which affects the performance of instant memory. After a full rest, the inhibition was lifted, so the memory performance picked up.

However, some people think that the phenomenon of memory recovery can appear a few days after memorization, and the inhibition of accumulation has been lifted long ago and will not last that long. So I think the above explanation is still not perfect.

Another explanation is that when children learn complex and interesting materials, the preservation of these materials is scattered and needs a period of consolidation and development. After a period of thinking and aftertaste, their memory has been strengthened and their memory has rebounded.

Extraction of Long-term Memory and Its Influencing Factors

The output process of extracting information. There are two ways to extract long-term memory information, namely recognition and memory. Recognition refers to the reproduction of materials that have been memorized in the past, which has a sense of familiarity and can be identified and confirmed. Memory refers to the representation of the materials of past memory in the mind. Both forms need certain clues to extract information, and also need to adopt certain strategies and choose certain intermediaries.

At present, there are two views on how to extract information: one theory holds that information extraction is to find memory traces according to the meaning and system of information, so as to activate traces and recall related items; Another theory holds that memory is an active process, in which some elements or components are stored, and memory is to integrate past cognitive components into a complete thing. These two theories are applicable to different coding forms. Search theory may be suitable for representation storage, while reconstruction theory is suitable for semantic storage.

On the one hand, the effect of extraction depends on storage; On the other hand, we should also look at clues. If the storage itself is organized, organized and hierarchical, it is easy to recall as long as some nodes in the hierarchical network are activated and the information related to these nodes is in the initial state when they are extracted. If the storage is chaotic, the extraction will not be smooth.

Clues play an important role in extraction, and because of the large number and high quality of clues, it is easier to extract. The quality of clues refers to whether the information in clues is closely related to the information in memory traces. Generally speaking, recognition is easier to extract information than memory, because relevant clues are the perceptual support of recognition, and more clues help to confirm as soon as possible.

The speed and accuracy of recognition mainly depend on the solidity and accuracy of memory. As soon as the memory appears, it can be recognized almost unconsciously, automatically and in a very short time.

In daily life, false recognition occurs from time to time for various reasons. One is that due to the unconsolidation and inaccuracy of memory, the original connection disappears or is disrupted. Once the memorized things reappear, the original memory traces can't be activated, only the familiarity can't be correctly recognized as a whole. Or there is an error in the extraction of related information (pattern), which leads to misunderstanding. The other is due to the generalization of contact, which leads to recognition errors. For example, a stranger is mistaken for an acquaintance because many of his characteristics are similar to those of an acquaintance, and these characteristics are generalized in his mind, leading to? Zhang Guan Dai Li? .

When learning to recognize Chinese characters, mistakes often occur. For example, the words "garrison", "Xu" and "Rong" are very similar, without careful perception and accurate distinction. After a long time, the traces in my mind are not clear, and it is very easy to be confused, so I often admit my mistakes. In addition, pathological disorders can also lead to ignorance or ignorance.

Memory is divided into intentional memory and unintentional memory. The former is a conscious, active memory with a predetermined memory intention and purpose driven by the memory task, while the latter is a natural memory of some old experiences without a clear memory purpose and intention and no effort to find it. A thing comes to mind by accident, and I can't help thinking or touching the scene, which leads to all kinds of memories aimlessly and involuntarily. The content of this kind of memory is often incoherent and unsystematic.

Regardless of recognition or recall, if you directly extract relevant information from long-term memory without relying on any intermediary or clue, the information extraction is almost automatic, and you don't even realize this procedure. This extraction is called direct search.

For example, when a friend of yours appears on the TV screen, you can immediately recognize him again, which is achieved by direct search. This recognition is also called direct recognition. If someone asks you who you will travel with this summer vacation, you will name some people, such as Zhang San and Li Si. This kind of memory is called direct memory, and this kind of extraction is called direct search.

Sometimes our recognition and memory need some clues or intermediary associations to realize recognition or memory. For example, what were you doing on the morning of June 3, 20081? It is difficult to recall this problem immediately, and it is often necessary to preprocess the problem with the help of diaries, memos or other intermediaries in order to determine the direction of memory and gradually narrow the scope of memory; In addition, we should put forward some assumptions, verify them one by one, and eliminate invalid memory clues. Through association, we can search for new clues until we finish the recall task and extract the necessary information. This kind of memory is called indirect memory.

Direct memory and indirect memory are not absolutely opposite, but can be transformed into each other under certain conditions. The content that could have been recalled directly, because it is sparse and indifferent, should be recalled through associative search. On the contrary, the content of indirect memory, because of the consolidation and proficiency of the connection, can be quickly reproduced in the mind without thinking. Association plays an important role in memory.

Memory is often in the form of associative search. The so-called association is the psychological activity of thinking of another thing from one thing. When something with a certain connection is reflected in people's mind and a temporary neural connection is established in the cerebral cortex, as long as one thing appears, it will cause association with another thing.

Extracting information from long-term memory will be influenced by many factors, both positive and negative. ?

Reasonable organization of information can improve the extraction efficiency.

Searching and extracting information from a huge long-term memory is like looking for a book in a library with many books. Whether books can be found smoothly is related to the classification, cataloging and storage of books. Similarly, people can organize information reasonably or put information in a certain context, which can increase clues and promote extraction.

1969, Bauer and others did an experiment and asked the subjects to memorize four words. The vocabulary provided for some subjects is organized according to the tree hierarchy; The words in the vocabulary provided to other subjects were randomly arranged. Memory test after memory. The results show that the correct recall rate of hierarchical words is 65%. For randomly arranged words, only 19% of the memory is correct. This experiment proves that highly organized materials and materials stored in hierarchical networks are helpful for extraction.

This is because the organization of materials provides favorable clues for the search process in the extraction process. However, searching for randomly arranged words is like walking a maze, which often bypasses some words and affects the smooth extraction.

This shows that reasonable organization of materials and storage according to the organizational system can ensure accurate and efficient extraction activities.

Keeping information in the context of encoding helps to extract information.

Because things are always in a certain environmental situation, when we remember, this situational factor is subtly accompanied by people's memory of things. When the situation of recognition or memory is more similar to that of memory, it is more conducive to information extraction. In other words, the information is in the context (or context) when encoding, which is the most powerful clue extraction in itself. Especially when extracting complex material, contextual clues related to the material are very helpful for the rapid recovery of the material.

Influence of interference on extraction

In life, we often encounter such a situation that a memory clue is connected with several related things. Among them, items with strong connection with a clue often interfere with the extraction of items with weak connection with the same clue. For example, basketball players change to play football, but they can't adapt at first. The reason is that the rules and skills of playing basketball are already familiar, even used to it. After kicking the ball, the original technology always interferes with the extraction of kicking information, and there are many fouls.

The more items associated with the same clue, the more difficult it is to extract the target item through this clue. If the items related to the same clue are processed, the interference between them will be reduced.

In addition, negative emotions will also hinder the extraction of information. For example, if you can't answer a difficult question in an exam, you will feel nervous and anxious, which will lead to various worries. In this state of mind, it will even interfere with the information related to answering questions, resulting in memory difficulties.

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