Memory: Recapitulation

Till now our focus was on learning where the emphasis was on acquisition. We shall now have the recap of the deliberation on memory where the emphasis is on retention. Memory is studied in terms of mental processes involved in storage and retrieval of information. The three major types of memory are sensory, short-term, and long-term. The incoming sensory inputs can be stored for a very brief period of time ranging from 0.25-2 seconds. This is called sensory memory. Some of these items can further be retained for 20-30 seconds in our short-term storage. Some of them are stored for very long time, days, months, years, or even life time. This is diagrammatically represented below.

Further, there are various subtypes of these major types of memory.