Cognitive Psychology

Cognitive Psychology Patrick Rabbitt Martin Conway, Gillian Cohen and Nicola Stanhope, ' On the very long term retention of knowledge acquired through formal education: twelve years of cognitive psychology'. Journal of Experimental Psychology (General), 120, 4 (1991), 395-409. Among the most interesting questions about human memory that all intelligent people vainly ask of psychologists are: can we retain information that we do not continually rehearse? Do memories entirely disappear unless we continually replay them or does information once firmly acquired only gradually deteriorate even though it may seldom if ever be recalled? Can we retain, or revive, in later life skills which we learned when we were young, but have never practised since? Are there qualitative differences between the types of information we forget, and that we retain? Laboratory-bound experimental psychologists have evaded these important issues because to answer them we need to test people's recall of large bodies of systematic information which they acquired many years ago and have seldom used since. Harry Bahrick and associates (e.g. Bahrick 1979, 1983, 1984; Bahrick, Bahrick and Wittlinger 1975; Bahrick and Phelps 1987) were the first to overcome these problems by studying very long-term retention of such bodies of formally acquired information as Spanish learned at school or university. Bahrick's most general conclusion was that a rapid loss over the first few years eventually asymptotes and no further decline occurs. Bahrick termed this basal level of recall the 'permastore'. The choice of word is not merely ornamental, and is perhaps even cunning, because it smuggles the innuendo that after some time the neurological substrate of memory may somehow become 'set in a way that stops further change. Neisser (1984) offered an alternative, less physiologically loaded, explanation that 'permastore' memories were robust because they represented a residue of'schemata', or dynamic procedures, which allowed people to reconstruct events, relationships and scenarios. If this is the case, 'permastore' memories should be qualitatively different from material that has been forgotten. They should be memories of procedures, or linked concepts, and not memories for particular details. This is the terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0144686X00004864 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 54.191.40.80, on 21 Aug 2017 at 11:20:50, subject to the Cambridge Core