Memory in psychology Sample Clauses

Memory in psychology. ‌ As with many topics, although the study of memory may have commenced within the sphere of philosophy, its investigation has in more recent times been taken up by psychology in a parallel stream. The definition of memory assumed within psychology is rather broader than that within philosophy. To take an obvious example: there is rarely, if ever, a requirement of factivity. Example definitions of memory from the recent literature include ‘[w]henever the experience of some past event influences someone at a later time’,20 or equally broadly, ‘an adaptation to the past’.21 A more scientific phrasing in the latter paper, hardly less broad, is ‘any perturbation in a system, caused by external stimulation, which persists past the cessation of the initial stimulation and alters the system’s responsiveness to subsequent stimulation’.22 There are multiple taxonomies of memory within psychology, which happily co- exist and serve different ends. For our purposes, the two most important partition- ings are (i) the distinction between short-term and long-term memory, and (ii) the distinction between episodic, semantic, and procedural memory. We will look at each of these in turn, followed by the standard division of the process of memory, which will be important in what follows.