Читать книгу Essentials of the California Verbal Learning Test - Thomas J. Farrer - Страница 16

Learning and memory have long been of interest to psychologists, with William James first proposing the concepts of short-term and long-term memory in 1890. Short-term memory was described as finite with low durability unless it was encoded into long-term memory that was more lasting and of infinite capacity. Ebbinghaus' (1885) famous experiments on memory described the processes of learning and forgetting and introduced the concepts of the learning curve (rate at which information is acquired over repeated trials), serial position effects (how position within a series of words impacts recall), and the forgetting curve (rate at which one forgets information with most decay occurring within the first 20 min after learning). These early descriptions and investigations into memory laid the groundwork for modern memory assessment.

Despite Ebbinghaus' experiments on the processes of learning and memory, the assessment of these concepts has historically focused on the amount of information an individual could encode, consolidate, and recall. Encoding is the process of taking external information and transforming it into mental representations or memories. Consolidation is the process through which information in immediate memory is moved into long-term memory, and retrieval is the process of recalling information from storage. Focus on the amount of recalled information allows a global picture of memory ability, including the determination of the presence of memory disorders.

With the use of immediate and delayed recall, memory assessments often provide scores for short-term memory and long-term memory, again measuring the amount of information retained. Short-term memory is the momentary storage of information, lasting from a few seconds to a few minutes. Memories lasting from hours to years are considered stored in long-term memory. Long-term memory can be categorized as either implicit or explicit memory. Implicit or procedural memory involves involuntary learning from experiences without conscious awareness, such as learning to ride a bike or drive a car. Explicit or declarative memory involves the purposeful storage and retrieval of information. Explicit memory can further be divided into semantic (factual) and episodic (personal events and context) memory. When described in these terms, the CVLT versions are measures of explicit episodic verbal memory.