Fundamental Law of Memory Recall

Memory, Recall Dynamics

How do we search our memories to recall information that occurred in a given temporal context? In the laboratory, this basic question concerning human memory is addressed by asking people to study a sequence of individually presented items (typically words) and then to try to recall all of the items they can remember in any order. This task, first introduced by E.A. Kirkpatrick in 1894, is term...

What about Memory, Consciousness, Recall, and Awareness in Anesthesia?

Is Piketty’s “Second Law of Capitalism” Fundamental?

In Capital in the Twenty-First Century , Thomas Piketty uses what he calls “the second fundamental law of capitalism” to predict that wealth-to-income ratios are poised to increase dramatically as economies’ growth rates fall during the twenty-first century. This law states that in the long run the wealth-to-income ratio equals s/g, where s is the economy’s saving rate and g its growth rate. We...

Adaptive memory: Animacy enhances free recall but impairs cued recall.

Recent research suggests that human memory systems evolved to remember animate things better than inanimate things. In the present experiments, we examined whether these effects occur for both free recall and cued recall. In Experiment 1, we directly compared the effect of animacy on free recall and cued recall. Participants studied lists of objects and lists of animals for free-recall tests, a...

Recall of remote episodic memory in amnesia.

Recall of remote episodic memory was assessed in three types of amnesic patient whose remote semantic memory had been evaluated previously. Patients with Korsakoff's syndrome, case N.A. and patients receiving electroconvulsive therapy all succeeded in recalling specific autobiographical episodes in response to single-word cues, and in many conditions performed as well as control subjects. Their...