Note: This paper was written for Q551 "Brain and Cognition" - a class taught by Thomas Busey at Indiana University, Fall Semester, 1999. The entire text is available here in PDF format. Below is the introduction and the bibliography. If you prefer another format or have any questions or comments, feel free to E-mail me.

1. Introduction

Figure 1. at left (Gazzaniga et al., 1998: 255) is a typical conception of the flow of memory from sensory input to long-term storage. In other models, the “boxes” may vary slightly — for example, “Short-term storage” may instead be “Working memory” with its own internal structure — but the essential idea remains the same. There is sensory input, input is stored in short-term memory, and depending on various factors (rehearsal, emotional state, etc) that information is stored in a “long-term memory”. Long-term memory, in turn, is typically divided into “explicit” and “implicit” memory (figure 2., Gazzinga et al, 1998: 273) and then further divided based supposed types of explicit and implicit memory.

These models are fundamentally lacking in their account of human perception and processing and ignore some obvious and some not-so obvious facts. Section 2. proposes an alternative model and provides justifications for the preceding claim concerning the efficacy of (1) and (2).

References:

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Brooks, R. A. 1997. Intelligence without Representation. In J. Haugeland (Ed.) Mind Design II. pp. 395-420. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA.

Gazzaniga, Michael, Richard Ivry, and George Mangun. 1998. Cognitive Neuroscience: The Biology of the Mind. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

Holland, John. 1975. Adaption in Natural and Artificial Systems. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

McLennan, Sean. ms. Schemata: Bootstrapping Language Acquisition. Indiana University, L645.

Rovee-Collier, C. 1991. The "memory system" of prelinguistic infants. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 608, 517-536.

Seidenberg, Mark. Language Acquisition and Use: Learning and Applying Probabilistic Constraints. Science 275: 1599-1603.

Sperling, G. 1960. The information available in brief visual presentations. Psychol. Monogr. Gen. Appl. 74:1-29.

Tulving, E. 1995. Organization of Memory: Quo vadis? In. M.S. Gazzaniga (Ed.), The Cognitive Neurosciences (pp. 839-847). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.