How Much do People Remember? Some Estimates of the Quantity of Learned Information in Long-Term Memory

How much information from experience does a normal adult remember? The “functional informotion content” of humon memory wos estimated in several ways. The methods depend on measured rotes of input and loss from very longterm memory and on onolyses of the informotionol demands of human memotybosed performance. Estimates ranged around 10’ bits. It is speculated that the flexible ond creative retrieval of facts by humans is a function of a large ratio of “hardware” capacity to functional storage requirements.

[1]  L. Standing.  Learning 10000 pictures , 1973 .

[2]  Allen Newell,et al.  How can Merlin understand , 1973 .

[3]  M. Potter,et al.  Recognition memory for a rapid sequence of pictures. , 1969, Journal of experimental psychology.

[4]  J J Hopfield,et al.  Neural networks and physical systems with emergent collective computational abilities. , 1982, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

[5]  C. Thompson,et al.  Memory for unique personal events: The roommate study , 1982, Memory & cognition.

[6]  Raymond S. Nickerson,et al.  A note on long-term recognition memory for pictorial material , 1968 .

[7]  Geoffrey E. Hinton,et al.  A Learning Algorithm for Boltzmann Machines , 1985, Cogn. Sci..

[8]  L. Standing.  Learning 10,000 pictures. , 1973, The Quarterly journal of experimental psychology.

[9]  R. Nickerson,et al.  SHORT-TERM MEMORY FOR COMPLEX MEANINGFUL VISUAL CONFIGURATIONS: A DEMONSTRATION OF CAPACITY. , 1965, Canadian journal of psychology.

[10]  B. R. Bugelski.  Presentation time, total time, and mediation in paired-associate learning. , 1962, Journal of experimental psychology.

[11]  Allan Collins,et al.  How to make a language user. , 1972 .

[12]  G. Bower,et al.  Human Associative Memory , 1973 .

[13]  T. Landauer.  Memory without organization: Properties of a model with random storage and undirected retrieval , 1975, Cognitive Psychology.

[14]  R. Shepard.  Recognition memory for words, sentences, and pictures , 1967 .

[15]  Donald A. Norman,et al.  A process model for long-term memory. , 1972 .