5. The importance of memory and personality on students' success.

MEMORY

Short - Term Memory

Explicit conscious

Implicit (unconscious)

Priming

Procedural Memory

(Working)

Episodic Memory

Long - Term Memory

(specific personal events and their context)

Semantic Memory

(general knowledge about the world)

Short-Term Memory

Short-term memory—closely related to "working" memory—is the very short time that you keep something in mind before either dismissing it or transferring it to long-term memory. Short-term memory is shorter than you might think, lasting less than a minute. It's what allows you to remember the first half of a sentence you hear or read long enough to make sense of the end of the sentence. But in order to store that sentence (or thought, fact, idea, word, impression, sight, or whatever else) for longer than a minute or so, it has to be transferred to long-term memory. Long-Term Memory

A long-term memory is anything you remember that happened more than a few minutes ago. Long-term memories aren't all of equal strength. Stronger memories enable you to recall an event, procedure, or fact on demand—for example, that Paris is the capital of France. Weaker memories often come to mind only through prompting or reminding Long-Term— Explicit

Explicit memory (also called "declarative memory") requires conscious thought—such as recalling who came to dinner last night or naming animals that live in the rainforest. Explicit memory is what most people have in mind when they think of "memory," and whether theirs is good or bad. Long-Term—Explicit—Episodic Memory

Episodic memory is one type of explicit memory. Episodic memory provides us with a crucial record of our personal experiences. It is our episodic memory that allows us to remember the trip we took to Vegas, what we had for dinner last night, who told us that our friend Maryann was pregnant. Any past event in which we played a part, and which we remember as an "episode" (a scene of events) is episodic. This form of memory appears to be centered in the brain's hippocampus—with considerable help from the cerebral cortex. To read more about this type of autobiographical memory. Long-Term— Explicit—Semantic Memory

Another type of explicit memory is semantic memoiy. It accounts for our "textbook learning" or general knowledge about the world. It's what enables us to say, without knowing exactly when and where we learned, that a zebra is a striped animal, or that Paris is the major city in France. Scientists aren't sure where semantic memory happens in the brain; some say in the hippocampus and related areas, while others think it's widely spread throughout the brain. Long-Term—Implicit

Implicit memory (also called "non-declarative" memory) is different from explicit memory in that it doesn't require conscious thought. It allows you to do things by rote. This memory isn't always easy to verbalize, since it flows effortlessly in our actions. Long-Term—Implicit—Procedural Memory

Procedural memory is the type of implicit memory that enables us to carry out commonly learned tasks without consciously thinking about them. It's our "how to" knowledge. Riding a bike, tieing a shoe and washing dishes are all tasks that require procedural memory. Even what we think of as "natural" tasks, such as walking, require procedural memory.

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