What happens when you try to remember some piece of information, say some fact about memory itself?
There are many different ideas about memory but the most common explanation is Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin’s (1968) stage model of memory.
First the items you are perceiving go into our sensory memory. We cannot attend to everything, so some information is lost in a second or two.
What we attend to goes into our short ­term memory where it can be held for about 18 seconds, or longer if we use maintenance rehearsal.
Maintenance rehearsal is often just repeating the item to yourself over and over. Short ­term memory is also often called working memory.
Items we want to remember more permanently are transferred to long term memory. We use elaborative rehearsal for this step.
To bring an item back to mind, we move the item from long­ term memory back to short ­term memory. This activity will focus on short ­term memory.