Current Thinking on Memory

While the Atkinson-Shiffrin model was extremely popular at the
time, today psychologists think of sensory memory as a part of perception,
held only so briefly in consciousness, and they think of
short-term and long-term memory as more part of a continuum,
with no clear distinction between them.10 Still, psychologists usually
distinguish between these two types of memory, and I will too, in
discussing ways you can improve both types of memory. In fact, with
the development of neuroscience and the recognition that we are
engaging in multiple forms of mental processing at the same
time—a process called ‘‘parallel distributed processing’’—psychologists
have recognized that memory is much more complex than earlier
scientists might have thought. Currently, the commonly accepted
model views memory in a more dynamic way, in which a central
processing system coordinates different types of memory input,
which may be visual or auditory or both. After taking into consideration
personal knowledge and experience, this central processor
passes selected bits of memory from the working memory into the
long-term memory. It’s a model that I’ll be using as a backdrop to
different types of memory techniques that are designed to make improvements
in each area of processing. In the next section, I’ll explain
in a little more detail how this works.