Premium
How much Do People Remember? Some Estimates of the Quantity of Learned Information in Long‐term Memory
Author(s) -
Landauer Thomas K.
Publication year - 1986
Publication title -
cognitive science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.498
H-Index - 114
eISSN - 1551-6709
pISSN - 0364-0213
DOI - 10.1207/s15516709cog1004_4
Subject(s) - term (time) , computer science , human memory , short term memory , function (biology) , long term memory , cognitive psychology , psychology , working memory , neuroscience , cognition , biology , physics , quantum mechanics , evolutionary biology
How much information from experience does a normal adult remember? The “functional information content” of human memory was estimated in several ways. The methods depend on measured rates of input and loss from very long‐ term memory and on analyses of the informational demands of human memory‐based performance. Estimates ranged around 10 9 bits. It is speculated that the flexible and creative retrieval of facts by humans is a function of a large ratio of “hardware” capacity to functional storage requirements.