PSYC 205 Chapter Notes - Chapter 3: Working Memory, Frontal Lobe, Blackboard
18 Dec 2017
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Document Summary
Memory the mental processes of acquiring and retaining information for later retrieval. Not all learning can be explained by stimulus-response associations. Measured as behavioural change due to past experience. Almost no cognitive processes could function without memory: memory is a necessary complement to other cognitive processes. While a stronger memory improves an organism"s fitness, it comes at the cost of using a lot of brain power. Why did we evolve to behave based on past experiences, when those past experiences could have been deadly due to the fact that we had no prior knowledge about them: because the world is ever-changing. If the world was stable we could just have evolved different reactions to different stimuli, but memory allows us to be malleable to our environment. Types of information remembered still match the ecological constraints of their environment: e. g. humans show better memory for stimuli associated with snakes or spiders than guns or electrical outlets.
