Multiple trace theory

Multiple trace theory (MTT) is a memory consolidation model advanced as an alternative model to strength theory. It posits that each time some information is presented to a person, it is neurally encoded in a unique memory trace composed of a combination of its attributes. Further support for this theory came in the 1960s from empirical findings that people could remember specific attributes about an object without remembering the object itself. The mode in which the information is presented and subsequently encoded can be flexibly incorporated into the model. This memory trace is unique from all others resembling it due to differences in some aspects of the item's attributes, and all memory traces incorporated since birth are combined into a multiple-trace representation in the brain. In memory research, a mathematical formulation of this theory can successfully explain empirical phenomena observed in recognition and recall tasks.

The attributes an item possesses form its trace and can fall into many categories. When an item is committed to memory, information from each of these attributional categories is encoded into the item's trace. There may be a kind of semantic categorization at play, whereby an individual trace is incorporated into overarching concepts of an object. For example, when a person sees a pigeon, a trace is added to the “pigeon” cluster of traces within his or her mind. This new “pigeon” trace, while distinguishable and divisible from other instances of pigeons that the person may have seen within his or her life, serves to support the more general and overarching concept of a pigeon.

Physical attributes of an item encode information about physical properties of a presented item. For a word, this could include color, font, spelling, and size, while for a picture, the equivalent aspects could be shapes and colors of objects. It has been shown experimentally that people who are unable to recall an individual word can sometimes recall the first or last letter or even rhyming words, all aspects encoded in the physical orthography of a word's trace. Even when an item is not presented visually, when encoded, it may have some physical aspects based on a visual representation of the item.

Contextual attributes are a broad class of attributes that define the internal and external features that are simultaneous with presentation of the item. Internal context is a sense of the internal network that a trace evokes. This may range from aspects of an individual's mood to other semantic associations the presentation of the word evokes. On the other hand, external context encodes information about the spatial and temporal aspects as information is being presented. This may reflect time of day or weather, for example. Interestingly, spatial attributes can refer both to physical environment and imagined environment. The method of loci, a mnemonic strategy incorporating an imagined spatial position, assigns relative spatial positions to different items memorized and then "walking through" these assigned positions to remember the items.

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