Types of Processing

Serial Processing

• One process occurring at a time

• Processes occur one after the other

• Like the information-processing/3-stage model

Parallel Processing

• Multiple tracks of processing occurring at the same time

• Like walking and talking, remembering the time after not thinking about it for a while

  • You may not be consciously processing, but it still is happening

• Not the same as multitasking

Effortful Processing

• Explicit/Declarative memories

• Experiences and facts

Automatic Processing

• Implicit/Non-declarative memories encoding unconsciously

• Often relate to time, space, frequency, etc.

• When you retrieve this information, you aren’t explicitly thinking about the topic, it just ‘comes to you’ when you need it

• Includes procedural memory and relates to classical conditioning