Psychology2016

234 CHAPTER 6

Rote is like “rotating” the information in one’s head, saying it over and over again. But

maintenance rehearsal is not the most efficient way of putting information into long-term

storage, because to get the information back out, one has to remember it almost exactly as

it went in. Try this: What is the 15th letter of the alphabet? Did you have to recite or sing

through the alphabet song to get to that letter?

Although many long-term memories are encoded as images (think of the Mona Lisa),

sounds, smells, or tastes (Cowan, 1988), in general, LTM is encoded in meaningful form,

a kind of mental storehouse of the meanings of words, concepts, and all the events that

people want to keep in mind. Even the images, sounds, smells, and tastes involved in these

events have some sort of meaning attached to them that gives them enough importance to

be stored long term. If STM can be thought of as a working “surface” or desk, then LTM can

be thought of as a huge series of filing cabinets behind the desk, in which files are stored

in an organized fashion, according to meaning. Files have to be placed in the cabinets in

a certain organized fashion to be useful—how could anyone ever remember any kind of

information quickly if the files were not in some order? The best way to encode information

into LTM in an organized fashion is to make it meaningful through elaborative rehearsal.

ELABORATIVE REHEARSAL Elaborative rehearsal is a way of increasing the num-

ber of retrieval cues (stimuli that aid in remembering) for information by connecting

new information with something that is already well known (Craik & Lockhart, 1972;

Postman, 1975). For example, the French word maison means “house.” A person could

try to memorize that (using maintenance rehearsal) by saying over and over, “ Maison

means house, maison means house.” But it would be much easier and more efficient if

that person simply thought, “Maison sounds like masons, and masons build houses.”

That makes the meaning of the word tie in with something the person already knows

(masons, who lay stone or bricks to build houses) and helps in remembering the French

term. In older versions of this concept, elaborative rehearsal was seen as a way of

transferring information from STM to LTM, but that makes the two forms of memory

sound like boxes. The "memory stores as boxes" idea is one of the main criticisms of the

information-processing model because it makes it seem as though there is nothing in

between STM and LTM. This is not the case; research has shown that information can

exist anywhere along the continuum of actively paying attention to an experience and

permanent storage of that experience (Raaijmakers, 1993; Raaijmakers & Shiffrin, 2003).

As discussed in the beginning of this chapter, Craik and Lockhart (1972) theorized

that information that is more “deeply processed,” or processed according to its mean-

ing rather than just the sound or physical characteristics of the word or words, will be

remembered more efficiently and for a longer period of time. As the levels-of-processing

approach predicts, elaborative rehearsal is a deeper kind of processing than maintenance

rehearsal and so leads to better long-term storage (Craik & Tulving, 1975).

I can remember a lot of stuff from my childhood. Some of it is

stuff I learned in school and some of it is more personal, like the first

day of school. Are these two different kinds of long-term memories?

TYPES OF LONG-TERM INFORMATION Long-term memories include general facts and

knowledge, personal facts, and even skills that can be performed. Memory for skills is

a type of nondeclarative memory, or implicit memory, because the skills have to be demon-

strated and not reported. Memory for facts is called declarative memory, or explicit memory,

because facts are things that are known and can be declared (stated outright). These two

types of long-term memory are quite different, as the following sections will explain.

NONDECLARATIVE (IMPLICIT) LTM Memories for things that people know how to do, like

tying shoes and riding a bicycle, are a kind of LTM called nondeclarative (implicit) memory.

The fact that people have the knowledge of how to tie their shoes, for example, is implied by

elaborative rehearsal
a method of transferring information
from STM into LTM by making that
information meaningful in some way.

nondeclarative (implicit) memory
type of long-term memory including
memory for skills, procedures, habits,
and conditioned responses. These
memories are not conscious but are
implied to exist because they affect
conscious behavior.

Nondeclarative knowledge, such as tying
one’s shoes, often must be learned by
doing, as it is difficult to put into words.
Once this child learns how to tie shoes,
the knowledge will always be there to
retrieve.