Английский язык. Горчакова Е.П - 24 стр.

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short- term memories. These short- term memories are forever
lost within a minute or so unless they are reprocessed into
long- term memories. This must occur almost immediately and
can be done by internal rehearsing or some other form of
consolidation means the end of that memory.

      We can improve our short- term memory by organizing
material into smaller, more manageable groups. One name for
this is chunking. Chunking requires that the material be coded
appropriately, before being stored. Unlike sensory memory,
coding in short- term memory need not faithfully reflect the
stimulus material. There is some evidence that words and
letters, whether spoken or written, tend to be coded according
to sound rather than appearance.
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      Long- term memory, which stores massive amounts of
material for several minutes or many years, must have an
efficient coding system. We do not fully understand this
system, but much is known about it. For example, words are
coded by clustering. This is a way of organizing material into
meaningful groups and thereby making it more manageable.
Other material is also organized by clustering. New facts or
experiences attach themselves to appropriate groups already in
memory storage, which means that grouping and regrouping,
organizing and reorganizing are constantly going on.

     You can improve your memory by imposing your own
organization on the material you want to remember, instead of
leaving the organizational process to chance association. By
thinking over your experiences and ideas, weaving them into
systematic relations with each other, you can consolidate them
into long- lasting memories.

     Long- term memories are forgotten in many ways,
depending in part on the conditions under which the memories
were first processed. One theory holds that experiences are
forgotten because the memories are interfered with by what
happens after the material is learned, as well as by what
happened beforehand. In the first case, the interference is
called retroactive inhibition; in the second, it is proactive
inhibition.