A Brief Review of Memory Research in Cognitive Neuroscience

I would have liked to start this paper by rst presenting a coherent model of human memory. After describing the functional components of the model and the structural components of the model, I would review the studies that provide evidence for each component and the interrelations between the components. After several sleepless nights, I gave up on this dream. And I decided that it was not my fault. The main reason why it is not my fault is that if such a coherent model was deducible from the data collected so far, one of the many intelligent people who devoted life times on this ideal would have come up with it. Unfortunately the data is sketchy. It highlights a few pieces here, and a few pieces there. Not only are the connections between diierent ndings poorly understood, in most cases the interpretation of a single nding is still under debate. Given this picture, my review could mirror nothing but the sketchy character of the available data. M.I.T. Artiicial Intelligence Laboratory working papers are produced for internal circulation and may contain information that is, for example, too preliminary or too detailed for formal publication. It is not intended that they should be considered papers to which reference can be made in the literature, nor are they distributed outside of the laboratory.