Cognitive psychology

Neuroscience

Psychology

Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior

The ACT theory of factual memory is presented. According to this theory, information is encoded in an all-or-none manner into cognitive units and the strength of these units increases with practice and decays with delay. The essential process to memory performance is the retrieval operation. It is proposed that the cognitive units form an interconnected network and that retrieval is performed by spreading activation throughout the network. Level of activation in the network determines rate and probability of recall. With these assumptions in place, the ACT theory is shown to predict interference results in memory, judgements of associative relatedness, impact of extensive practice on memory, the differences between recognition and recall, effects of elaborative processing, and effects of reconstructive recall.

A spreading activation theory of memory