Glossary

Lobotomy

A lobotomy is a procedure that involves the cutting of connections to or from the prefrontal cortex, or simply destroying them. This procedure was used in the past to treat severe mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia, anxiety disorders, or clinical depression. This procedure is rarely conducted in present day as patients who have had lobotomies in the past have shown that it can result in major personality changes or even mental retardation.

Sensory Memory

Sensory memory occurs when a person is able to retain impressions of sensory information after the original stimulus has come and gone. Stimuli first detected by the five senses are temporarily retained in sensory registers. While these registers have a large capacity for holding unprocessed sensory information, they can only how accurate sensory information for a short span of time. This time frame is understood to be more than 1 second, but no more than 2. Sensory memory is short lived and is performed automatically. Only the most pertinent information is filtered into short-term memory.

Short-term memory

- Also known as primary, working, or active memory.

Short-term memory is the capacity to hold a small amount of information in the mind for a short amount of time, typically 20 seconds. The capacity of short term memory can vary, but it is estimated that it is limited to 7 (give or take 2) elements. This is in stark contrast to long-term memory, which, theoretically, can hold infinite numbers of information for a long time (even permanently).

Information held in the short-term memory is active, highly accessible, yet small. The information held may include:

• Pertinent sensory input
• Items you’ve retrieved from long-term memory
• Information generated from mental processes (reasoning)
• Information you are trying to rehearse and retain in long-term memory
  

Recall

Recall is the act of retrieving information where a question is asked, and a person is required to produce information as accurately as possible. (E.g. short-answer, fill-in questions, essay questions).

Recognition

Recognition is a relatively simpler task whereby a person is required to pick out the correct response to answer a question. (E.g. multiple choice questions, matching questions, fill-in questions with word banks provided.) Typically, people perform better on recognition tasks because there are more prompts in the questions that cue us to find information stored in long-term memory.