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Most contemporary researchers discuss three elements to the concept of memory: (1) Memory is the place or storage area where social and nonsocial information is held; (2) memory is also the specifics or content of an experience or event, also referred to as the memory trace; and (3) memory is the term used to describe the mental process through which people learn, store, or remember this information. In addition, when discussing memory and memory processes, researchers often refer to the related concept of a mental representation. A mental representation is an encoded construction that people can access, store, retrieve, and use in a variety of ways. For example, each person has a mental representation of his or her mother. The collections of feelings, beliefs, and knowledge you have about your mother constitute your mental representation of her.

Background and History of Memory Research Memory is a topic that has enjoyed the attention of academics and thinkers for literally thousands of years. Almost 2,500 years ago, Plato argued that memory was a wax tablet whereupon one’s everyday experiences left their impressions. An important consequence of this characterization, one that was accepted as truth for some time, is that once a memory is encoded it is set and unchangeable. Although a memory can be forgotten for some time, it could eventually be completely and accurately retrieved. Conversely, Aristotle argued that memories were associations among different stimuli and experiences. This idea was further developed by the likes of John Locke and David Hume in the 1600s and 1700s. An associative network allows for a greater fluidity of memory and implies that memories and mental representations may change or be forgotten over time. This latter view is more consistent with current psychological thought.

One of the most comprehensive early approaches to human memory was published by Hermann Ebbinghaus in his 1885 book on the subject. Ebbinghaus’s work focused on the learning of new information (typically nonsense words), and he developed curves to describe how people learned and subsequently forgot new information. Many of his results have laid the foundations for current thought on learning and memory for new information. Some time later, Sir Frederic Bartlett began focusing on how existing knowledge influenced learning and memory. He proposed that memory was actually a constructive process and that people, in trying to recollect, often reconstructed memories from the fragments that were available. Since these early findings, understanding memory processes has been a focus in a number or areas of psychology including perception, behaviorism, verbal learning, and neuroscience. Consistent with this broad focus in the psychological literature, memory and memory effects have been a core subject of study in social psychology.

Development of Models of Memory

Within the concept of memory, researchers have made a distinction between explicit (often referred to as declarative) and implicit (often referred to as nondeclarative) memory. Explicit memory can be defined as the conscious or intentional act of trying to remember something (such as your mother’s birthday), whereas implicit memory can be thought of as the way in which people’s memories and prior experiences (i.e., mental representations) affect the way they think about and process information in their social worlds. An example of this would be how people’s attitudes about a topic (their beliefs or opinions stored in memory) affect how they process incoming information about that topic. For example, your attitude toward your mother influences your definition of what represents a good versus a bad mother. Importantly, with implicit memories, people are not necessarily aware that their memories have an influence on them. Explicit memory can be further divided into episodic memory (memory for specific events) and semantic memory (memory for the meaning of things, such as words).

In the 1950s, researchers began to carefully delineate different models of memory. Two types of memory models that have substantially affected the field of social psychology are the related concepts of associative networks and schemas. The associative network model posits that memories are simply the collected associations between different nodes of concepts, sensations, and perceptions. These nodes are linked by being repeatedly associated with each other. Every time the memory is accessed or activated, the associative link between the nodes is strengthened. The more often this happens, the easier the association (i.e., the memory) is to activate. Associative network models fundamentally propose a bottom-up processing strategy whereby larger meanings are constructed from the associations among linked concepts.

Conversely, schemas can be defined as more comprehensive representations in memory that provide a framework for interpreting new information. As such, schemas suggest a top-down processing strategy. New information is incorporated into existing schemas, and this information is understood in relation to it. Whereas the associative network approach suggests that people incorporate new information by creating novel associations, schema theory suggests people understand new information by relating it to their existing knowledge and expectations. Far from being contradictory, these processes work in a complementary fashion, depending on the requirements of the situation.

Memory in the Context of Social Psychology

Although research into memory has been conducted primarily by cognitive psychologists, it is a core research area within social psychology as well. Imagine that you could not remember the people you met from day to day. Each time you saw your roommate, friends, or family members, you would need to get to know them all over again. Clearly, memory is essential to our social interactions.

Similar findings have been reported in the impression formation literature. That is, when people meet a person for the first time, their expectations about the person (e.g., stereotypes about specific groups and their members) or the situation (e.g., a script or set of beliefs about how an event, such as a romantic encounter, should unfold) can influence how they perceive and judge that person. If they expect someone to be nice, they will remember him or her as being pleasant and friendly. Interestingly, if their expectations are particularly strong when they encounter schema-incongruent information, that inconsistent information may be remembered better (i.e., they may begin to create a new associative network or information). Thus, as with the attitude literature, people tend to demonstrate a confirmatory bias, but if their expectations are strong, the inconsistent information may be particularly salient and thus may be remembered better. Although there has been debate in the literature about how and when these effects occur, mental representations and memory affect how people interact with their social worlds.

The social psychological aspects of memory research have been applied to real-world settings in several areas. For example, police and the courts have had a necessary interest in human memory. Much of what happens in the court system relies on people’s memories and how their mental representations influence information processing. Issues such as interviewing witnesses, eyewitness identification, and jury decision making have all received a great deal of attention in the social psychological literature. Within the area of eyewitness memory, one popular area of research has been the exploration of false memories. A significant amount of empirical research indicates that false memories are relatively easy to create and that these memories can be held with as much confidence and clarity as true memories. This further reinforces the concept of memory as malleable over time and retrieval as a reconstructive process.