1.8 Rehearsal as a strategy to improve memory

The key processes that determine the strength of memory trace are

• repetition

• maintenance rehearsal

• elaborative rehearsal

Maintenance rehearsal

occurs when remembering information for a short period of time by repeating it for immediate use

Elaborative rehearsal

involves active processing and encoding of information by

• Focusing on semantics of the information

• Organising the information in relation to other information

• Linking it to existing information in LTM

Chunking

Combining information into larger, meaningful groups.

Ebbinghaus (1885)

memorized lists of nonsense trigraphs, e.g. ZIC, and relearned them at increasing intervals over 31 days

His results demonstrated

• An exponential loss of information over time

• Recall accuracy decreases rapidly after learning with 66 percent forgotten within 24 hours and the rate of decay slowing over time

• Repetition based on active recall slowed the rate of decay