Memory

Memory reconstruction has also been studied in the context of eyewitness accounts. Interestingly, research shows little relationship between a witness's degree of certainty and the accuracy of the memory, illustrating that confidence levels, like the contents of memory, are malleable. Witnesses become more certain of their recall if they receive corroborating information from someone viewed as having reliable information. These results underscore the point that memory is not pure. What we remember is affected by what we believe about the person or event being remembered.

Emotion and Memory

Recent research has focused on how memories are shaped by a person's emotional state. Interest in this topic started with Freud's concept of repression, or the motivated forgetting of threatening material. Although interest in documenting repression-like effects continues, recent research has discovered several further phenomena relating memory to emotion and mood.

"Mood-congruent memory" occurs when one's current mood aids the processing of material that has a similar emotional valence. Thus, a depressed mood heightens memory for unpleasant events, while elation heightens memory for pleasant events. Depression affects both the storage and retrieval of memories. Depressed people pay more attention to material that agrees with their current mood, causing it to be better learned; at retrieval, sad mood apparently provides internal cues that help call forth similar emotional memories. Mood congruency is especially powerful when remembering autobiographical events. Subjects recall personal memories more readily when the mood of those events matches their current mood state.

Such studies are important in indicating how cognition and emotion interact. Our thoughts can affect our emotional states, just as our emotions can affect how we perceive, think, and remember. Understanding these effects is especially important when depression or anxiety is treated by cognitive-behavioral therapy, which often requires clients to acknowledge, remember, and rehearse previous times when they were happy and successful or courageous and fearless.

Forms of Memory

Traditional philosophers regarded memory as a single mental faculty, governed by simple rules and processes. However, recent research has shown that, far from being unitary, memory can be analyzed into a number of forms or systems, each with distinct characteristics and processes.

Working Memory

"Working memory" refers to the processes involved in temporary, short-term storage and use of fleeting information, such as holding telephone numbers in memory while dialing. Behavioral researchers have made considerable progress in recent years in understanding the mechanisms involved in working memory and in clarifying its role in everyday cognitive performance. For example, working memory has a speech-based component (strongly implicated in verbal intelligence and understanding language) and a perceptual-imagery component (implicated in spatial ability and reasoning with mental images).