Chunking: The process of taking single items of information and collecting them based on similarity, association, or other organizing principles, into larger wholes.
Classical Conditioning: A form of learning in which behavior or conditional response comes to be elicited by a stimulus that has acquired its power through an association with a biological stimulus, such as food, or repetition. Also called Pavlovian conditioning, after the Russian physiologist, Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, whose experiments with dogs revolutionized the concept of memory and response.
Engram: The hypothesized chemical change in the brain resulting from the storing of memory information; also called memory traces.
Functional Amnesia: A severe type of memory loss caused by psychological factors such as anxiety, hysteria, or repression.
Mnemonic: Technique or device used to aid in memorization.
Organic Amnesia: A permanent form of memory loss, resulting from biological devastation to the brain, such as disease, alcoholism, chemical poisoning, and senility.
Repression: Freudian theory of expelling or excluding painful thoughts or memories from conscious awareness by storing them in the subconscious.
Serial Position Effect: A characteristic of retrieval in which a person's recall of first and last items in a list is better than recall of other items.