How People Remember

Working memory is the memory you need for less than a minute. Information in working memory is easily interfered with. Working memory is tied to your ability to focus attention. If you want to maintain information in working memory, you will have to keep your attention focused on it. Stress reduces the effectiveness of working memory.

Despite the urban legend about how the magical number is seven, plus or minus two, the actual magic number, as discovered by psychologist Alan Baddely, turns out to be four. People can only hold three or four things in working memory as long as they aren't distracted and their processing of the information is not interfered with. This is why the U.S. phone numbers are chunked together like 253-555-7755. Instead of having to remember 10 numbers separately, people can remember phone numbers in thee parts.

In order for you to move things from working memory to long-term memory you have to either repeat it a lot, or connect it to something they already know. People use schemata to store information in long-term memory and to retrieve it.

Recognition is easier than recall. Recognition makes use of context, and context can help you remember. When you use schema to remember items, it can be helpful but it can also create errors.

The recency effect is where you remember the ending of something, and the suffix effect is when you remember the beginning of that something.

Whenever people think of their memories they are reconstructed each time. This causes memories to change over time. This is also why eyewitness testimonies are unreliable.