How can psychology explain people’s ability to remember information? You learned in Chapter 1 that psychologists formulate scientific explanations at three levels of analysis: person, mind, and brain. Let’s see how each might help to explain the following simple example.

One day in class, your psychology instructor briefly flashes up on screen the following: “Exam: Next Tuesday. Textbook Coverage: Chapters 7, 8, and 9.”

A few days later, you think to yourself: “They said something in class about a psych exam, didn’t they? Maybe I should have put it in my calendar. Hmm, what was it?” After some mental effort, you remember “Tuesday” and “Chapters, 7, 8, and 9.” How can psychology explain this ability to remember?

Person and brain levels of analysis are informative; but when it comes to the study of memory, they are incomplete. The person level does not explain how memory works: the processes and structures that enable a person to remember material. The brain level provides biological information, but may fail to provide the psychological information needed to fully understand memory. Consider the results when one research team obtained brain images during a memory task (Miller et al., 2002). The brain activity of participants varied substantially from one person to another—even though they were all performing the exact same task! Based on the biological information alone, one couldn’t even tell that the participants were engaged in the same psychological activity. This suggests the need for another level of analysis: the mind.

Explanations at a mind level of analysis refer to processes of thinking and to information that people acquire, retain, and draw upon when they think. Psychologists working at a mind level of analysis try to answer questions such as the following: How do people detect information in the environment (e.g., information such as “Exam, Tuesday, Chapters 7, 8, and 9”)? Where and how do they store information after they detect it? How long does information remain in memory once it is stored? How do people retrieve stored information when they need it? Such questions are at the heart of mind-level analyses of memory.

Historically, research at a mind level of analysis was inspired by developments in computer science. Psychologists drew an analogy between computers and the human mind (Newell & Simon, 1961). A computer is built of electronic hardware but runs software—programs or “apps.” You can understand the software without understanding the hardware. You know, for example, that your smartphone directed you to the nearest Starbucks by (1) identifying your location; (2) accessing a map; and (3) using that map, determining the shortest route from your location to a Starbucks. You know this even if you lack knowledge of the electronic components inside your phone; you can understand the flow of information without understanding the electronics. Similarly, cognitive psychologists—those who specialize in the study of mental processes, especially memory, reasoning, learning, and problem solving—judged that they could study flows of information in the human mind (the software) without fully understanding how the brain (the hardware) works (Simon, 1992).

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In the rest of this chapter, we will follow their lead. We first will focus on memory and the mind: mental processes that enable you to retain information. Then, at the end of the chapter, we’ll explore memory and the brain.