What I am? I play a central role in all cognitive processes. I am a crucial part of behavior of both animals and people. I am needed to recognize potential mates predators and to survive. Without me life would de impossible? .
Have you decoded the riddle? If you have not, I am memory.
Memory is a very broad topic in the area of cognitive psychology (including such topics; Nature of Memory, Theories of Memory, Organization of Memory, Forgetting, practical applications of memory) The essay is concerned with answering the question," What is being stored in memory." The question will be tackled from a human perceptive, therefor we are examining what is being stored in human brain. (But it is important to recognize that most species have some form of memory, for example animals need to be able to identify suitable prey, predators, and potential mates. Let's not forget information technology (I.T), but these are topics of there own.
Exactly what is stored in the human brain is not precisely known, research in this area is inconclusive. However research suggests that "something" is stored in the human brain or we would be servants of the moment. There would be no language, art, science, nor culture. Civilization itself is the distillation of memory. This essay aims to answer what is being stored in human memory. To do this we will consider the nature of memory. However first of all a definition of memory and storage is needed.
There are many definitions of memory. Reber (1985) identifies memory as a word to describe the actual information that is retained. Memory involves three operations registration, storage and retrieval. We are concerned with storage (although the other two operations are very important). Storage is the operation of holding information in memory. Now we have identified the two key concepts of the question; memory and storage, we will now consider the nature of memory.
Research suggest there is more than one type of memory; short term memory, working memory and long term memory.