Journal Entry
ACTIVATING YOUR MEMORY
Describe a time when you successfully remembered items in a list or specific pieces of information (for example, certain dates from history, all the bones in the human hand, or a favorite family recipe). What memory strategies or tools helped you remember this information?
Now describe an experience in which you forgot a key piece of information. What do you think happened? Was it an encoding error (meaning the information never made it into your short-term memory)? Was it a retrieval failure (meaning you had stored the information in your long-term memory, but you couldn’t remember it when you needed to)? What strategies described in this chapter could have helped you encode or retrieve this material?