Instead, several parts of the brain seem to be important to good working memory skills.Ĭhildren use their working memory skills when they recall the steps of long-division while working on a long-division problem. No single part of the brain is responsible for working memory capacity.

The vast majority of information in working memory is not encoded into long-term memory. It decays or is replaced, or sometimes gets encoded into long-term memory. New information in working memory is temporary. Working memory is the part of short-term memory that allows our brain to hold onto information for a brief period of time while doing something else. Sometimes people use the term interchangeably with short-term memory, but it’s not quite the same. Working Memory is a special kind of memory. Information that was stored in a meaningful and organized way is often much easier to retrieve. Whether we can remember something or not depends on the way it was stored and the cues that are used to try to access the information. Memories that are stored, at times, need to be retrieved or recovered. Short-term memories include things like taking a coffee order for your friends at work, or remembering names of people at a party. Other information can be stored in short-term memory, which is a more limited memory system that allows us to hold information in mind for a short period of time. A good example of long-term memory is remembering scenes from a family vacation, say, to Yellowstone national park, when you were 10 years old. Some information is encoded in a way that it becomes a long-term memory, one that can last a lifetime. Once we perceive or encode information, the information then must be stored in our brain. Before something can be remembered, it first has to be perceived through one or more of our senses and be encoded, or understood by our brain. There are at least three important aspects of memory: In general, memory is our ability to use information from the past in the present. Each of us has a distinct and irreplaceable store of information that affects our feelings, perceptions, and opinions. The ability to have and recall memories is what makes us unique individuals.