Retrieving Your Memories

Once a memory is encoded in long-term memory, there are several
ways to retrieve it—and many of the techniques described in later
chapters will help you do that.
Psychologists distinguish between two ways of looking at how
well you retrieve a memory—either explicitly through recall or recognition,
or implicitly, when your memory enables you to do some activity,
even though you aren’t consciously trying to remember how to
do it.23
Your recall is your ability to call up a particular memory; your
recognition is your ability to recognize whether or not you know
or are familiar with something. As you well know from your own
experience, it’s always more difficult to recall something than to simply
recognize it as being familiar. This is the difference between having
to come up with a definition or identification for something on
a test versus selecting a multiple-choice or true/false answer.
One way that psychologists test for recall ability—an approach
that will be incorporated in some later exercises for memory improvement—
is asking subjects to read a list of words, then take a
break, and later try to write down as many words as they can. Or
they might do this exercise with numbers, nonsense syllables, cities,
animal names, or anything else they choose.
They test for recognition in a very similar way. Subjects are given
a list of words or other items and, after a break, are shown another
list and asked to identify the items on the original list.24 In both
recall and recognition, errors can easily creep in, such as not remembering
an item on a list or thinking that something is on the list that
isn’t.
As for implicit memory, a typical example of testing for this
ability is to give subjects in an experiment a list of items with some
information left out—such as having missing letters in words or having
some missing lines in a drawing.25 Then, the subjects have to fill
in what’s missing. If they have seen the words, drawings, or other
items in the test before, they will be able to complete the items more
quickly and accurately, because they have a memory of seeing those
items before.
Whatever the type of task, if you have previous experience with
the material or skill involved, you will be able to do it better. For
example, even if you haven’t ridden a bike, picked up a tennis racquet,
or spoken a language you learned in college for many years,
you will generally find if you are in a situation where you have to
use that skill again, you will be able to use it even if you are a little
rusty. When you work on learning and remembering that ability
again, you will learn it faster than you did the first time.
Moreover, if your experience is more recent, you will be more
likely to recall, recognize, or use an implicit memory to complete a
task. So it makes sense to refresh your memory closer to the time
when you will need it—otherwise, a good recollection of something
may not be there when you need it. For example, a woman in a
Native American literature class I took thought she would get a leg
up on the course if she read over the material the first night after
the class. But when it came time to take a short quiz on the reading,
she completely blanked out on the stories. However, when the professor
discussed the books later in the course, she found the material
familiar.
That loss of memory is what happens if you learn something too
far away in time from when you need to recall that information and
don’t try to refresh your memory closer to the time you need to know
this material. Your memory of something you have learned gradually
fades if you don’t use that memory. So while you may be able to
recognize that you learned something days later or may be able to
pull up relevant information with a specific trigger word, phrase, or
sentence, a more general recall task will leave you blank. As you’ll
learn in subsequent chapters, there are strategies to use in order to
freshen up selective memories and decide when to learn what you
need to know.
Another complication to storing and retrieving new information
is that when you learn something, what you have previously learned
may interfere with learning something new. Psychologists call this
‘‘proactive interference’’—and there can be even more interference
when the two things you are trying to learn are similar.26 Your previous
memories interfere with what you are learning now. For instance,
you meet a woman named Angie at a party and you already
know an Annie—you might mistakenly call Angie, Annie, and even
if you are corrected, you may continue to make that same mistake.
Or say you are trying to learn about the new regulations affecting
your insurance policy. You may find your memory of the old policy
interfering, so you confuse the two. Improving your memory will
help you deal with this proactive interference problem. Incidentally,
don’t confuse proactive interference, which is a problem when past
learning interferes with future learning, with proactive listening and
observing, which is something you want to do so you more actively
learn something when you listen or look closely.