The Oxford Handbook of Memory

Memory is usually thought of as the ability to recollect past events and to bring learned facts and ideas back to mind. Memory and learning have these functions indeed, but an adequate definition must necessarily bring in further aspects. For example, whereas past happenings may be reexperienced consciously, they can also affect behavior in the absence of such conscious awareness. In addition, the mental activities of learning and memory clearly have their neural counterparts in brain activities, and a full understanding of memory and related functions must therefore involve an understanding of the brain mechanisms of acquisition, storage, and retrieval. Recent scientific studies thus deal with memory and learning at the levels of experience, behavior, and neural mechanisms; each level can be understood in its own terms, but any final theory must also show how the different levels of

description map onto each other. Because memory and learning are such all-pervasive shapers of human existence, their scientific study has never been far from center stage in experimental psychology and related brain sciences.