RETRIEVAL PRACTICE Take a moment to answer each of these Learning Objective Questions (repeated here from within this section). Then click the 'show answer' button to check your answers. Research suggests that trying to answer these questions on your own will improve your long-term retention (McDaniel et al., 2009).

Our long-term memory capacity is essentially unlimited. Memories are not stored intact in the brain in single spots. Many parts of the brain interact as we encode, store, and retrieve memories.

Explicit (declarative) memories―our conscious memories of facts and experiences―form through effortful processing, which requires conscious effort and attention. The frontal lobes and hippocampus are parts of the brain network dedicated to explicit memory formation. Many brain regions send information to the frontal lobes for processing. The hippocampus, with the help of surrounding areas of cortex, registers and temporarily holds elements of explicit memories before moving them to other brain regions for long-term storage. The neural storage of long-term memories is called memory consolidation.

Implicit (nondeclarative) memories―of skills and classically conditioned associations―happen without our awareness, through automatic processing. The cerebellum and basal ganglia are parts of the brain network dedicated to implicit memory formation. The cerebellum is important for storing classically conditioned memories. The basal ganglia are involved in motor movement and help form procedural memories for skills. Many reactions and skills learned during our first three years continue into our adult lives, but we cannot consciously remember learning these associations and skills, a phenomenon psychologists call “infantile amnesia.”

Emotional arousal causes an outpouring of stress hormones, which lead to activity in the brain’s memory-forming areas. Significantly stressful events can trigger very clear flashbulb memories.

Long-term potentiation (LTP) appears to be the neural basis of learning. In LTP, neurons become more efficient at releasing and sensing the presence of neurotransmitters, and more connections develop between neurons.

External cues activate associations that help us retrieve memories; this process may occur without our awareness, as it does in priming. The encoding specificity principle is the idea that cues and contexts specific to a particular memory will be most effective in helping us recall it. Returning to the same physical context or emotional state (mood congruency) in which we formed a memory can help us retrieve it. The serial position effect accounts for our tendency to recall best the last items (which may still be in working memory) and the first items (which we’ve spent more time rehearsing) in a list.