The Importance Of A Memory Process

People are able to remember experiences that meet in life. Some of life episodes may be remembered well or poorly remembered. This is the result of memory. Without memory, people fail to remember the things in life and they fail to learn anything. People would not be able to remember what they did, what have done and what they intend to do in their lives. Hence, memory is a significant element in our lives. Memory is the process where “we draw on our past experiences in order to use this information in the present” (Sternberg, 1999, p. 154). As elaborated by Sternberg (1999), there are three important stages in a memory process namely encoding information, storing encoded information and retrieving stored information (refer to Figure 1 in Appendix 1). The first stage in memory process is to encode information. Encoding refers to the step how information is transformed from a physical sensory input to a kind of memory representation (Sternberg, 1999). When information comes into memory system, it is required to change from sensory input to a form which the memory system can cope with and store. According to Passer and Smith (2011), there are two aspects involve in the stage of encoding information which are automatic processing and effortful processing. Firstly, automatic processing is apparently a way of transferring information into long-term memory without intention and it requires minimal attention (Hasher & Zacks, 1979). It operates at a fixed level under all