Know why I am doing a series on this?

What Psychologists Don’t Talk About?

What Psychologists Don’t Talk About Remembering?

CONTENTS

Introduction
FOUR KINDS OF REMEMBERING
1. Recognition
2. Recall
3. Redintegration
4. Relearning
Interactive Stages of Memory
Suggestions and Recommendations

Introduction

Imagine

students entering examination halls fully capable of answering,
executives entering seminar halls fully confident of presentation, or
teachers entering a classroom fully equipped with lesson plans!

We could have achieved it long ago. However, billions of students have come and gone. Millions of teachers have been teaching the same subjects over and over again. However, all of them are kept in the dark, all over the world, simply because of what psychologists don’t talk about remembering.

I searched on Google keying in “Kinds of Remembering” and got information on Types of Memory! I searched with the quotation marks and still got the same information. Searching on Google Scholar and Microsoft Copilot also didn’t tell me about the four kinds of remembering. The latter only mentioned ‘recalling facts’.

This signifies that psychologists have stopped talking about Remembering.

Before getting into the kinds of remembering, let me clarify that there is a vast difference between memory and remembering.

Unfortunately, they are considered almost similar, even in academic circles. However, my experience says that memory is a process whereas remembering is a function of memory.

Memory includes encoding, storage, and retrieval. The retrieval part refers to remembering and failure to retrieve is forgetting.

Just because someone doesn’t remember does not mean that they don’t have that information in their memory.

How many times have we encountered the “tip-of-the-tongue phenomena?”
A place, an event, or a situation may trigger our memory that we may have forgotten.
Students will tell you how well they can remember after the examination is over.
During job interviews, even simple things are not remembered by the applicants.

Educationists and psychologists don’t realize that if they had been talking about the kinds of remembering it would have benefited not only students and teachers but also every person on earth. Everyone has to keep retrieving information to stay alive.

FOUR KINDS OF REMEMBERING

There are four kinds of remembering, all starting with the letter ‘R’ – Recognition, Recall, Redintegration, and Relearning.

1. Recognition

The easiest way of retrieving information from the storage is through recognition.

Students are asked ‘multiple choice questions’ where they have to recognize the correct answer out of the four choices. ‘Matching’ is another example of recognition.

This is a kind of retrieval that we use hundreds of times every day. The objective of concept formation is to ease our recognition capability. If this is absent, we can’t even return home after going out. We recognize places, ideas, things, objects, people, etc. We may even recognize someone after several decades though we would not have met them during all these years and considerable changes would have happened in them.

2. Recall

The next commonly used retrieval is to recall the stored information.

Students are asked to ‘fill in the blanks’ where usually they are expected to supply one or two words. This is the easiest of them all. Questions starting with what, where, when, etc., (knowledge-related questions) that expect ‘short answers’ and why, how, explain, illustrate, etc. (comprehension questions) that expect ‘long answers’, try to find out if students can recall in detail.

As adults, when we meet an acquaintance, we may recognize the face but we need to recall the name. Recall is used extensively by adults. It may range, for instance, from recalling a list of groceries to writing a report.

3. Redintegration

Though this kind of retrieval is used most extensively, very few people are aware of it. This is to collate or reconstruct information from different sources of storage.

Students are asked questions like analyze, evaluate, critically examine, etc. Their ability to apply, analyze, synthesize, and evaluate is being measured. Most ‘essay-type’ questions fall under this category. Competitive exams, like the Civil Services Examination especially, expect the candidate to reintegrate known information in an organized manner.

[Detailed classification of the type of questions according to Bloom’s Taxonomy can be found in 'Pass any exam equipped with these Questions']

As adults, we use this kind of retrieval extensively, every day. Right from cooking a meal to complex things like organizing a marriage function, we have to restore a large amount of information.

Some people consider redintegration to be similar to recall but they both are quite different.

In recall, you are bringing out information from a single source whereas in redintegration you are combining and articulating information from several sources that have been stored at different points in time.

As in the figure below, the bits and pieces stored in different places are conjoined to make a complete picture when you retrieve them.

For example, it is said on the internet that remembering a song after you hear a small portion of music is considered a redintegrative memory. However, this is not true. The whole song is recorded as one single unit and you are only recalling it. Hearing a small portion is similar to a question being asked in the examination.

Suppose you are given a small portion of music and you are asked to identify several songs based on that melody or tune (raga), then you are using redintegration.

To put it simply, if you remember the recipe needed to make a dish, then it is recalled. However, trying to remember how to prepare the dish involves redintegration. This is one more thing psychologists don’t talk about.

4. Relearning

The one kind of remembering that is extensively used by one and all and the one that is most ignored by almost everyone is relearning.

Forgetting may occur when something is learned initially. However, not everything is forgotten and you reduce time and effort to relearn. That is why this is also called the “Savings Method.”

Students, and even teachers and parents are shocked when I say that education is mostly relearning.

Whenever I address 10^th-standard students I tell them that they have very few new things to study during the present year as it is a collection of what they studied for the last 11 years.

However, students, teachers, parents, and psychologists don’t agree with me because they would have forgotten what they had studied earlier. Thus, in the present education system, students learn every year only to forget it completely during the holidays. Later, they appear fresh to the next class as if their mind is blank.

Let us say, young children study a chapter on ‘Light’ for the first time. If the children are told that they will be studying it once again in the next class, they would prefer to retain it. Next, it becomes easy for the children when it gets repeated, as it takes little time and effort to relearn. The child will then focus more on additional material.

As this does not happen, everyone struggles throughout the year to study the same material repeatedly.

Interactive Stages of Memory

Psychologists tend to think that the memory process occurs unidirectionally—from Encoding to Retrieval via Storage. However, they fail to understand that we can mold the process. For example, if students are taught to encode depending on how the retrieval happens later, their memory would be stronger.

Research in cognitive psychology has shown that remembering can enhance the encoding of information. (McDermott, K. B. & Roediger, H. L. (2024). Memory (encoding, storage, retrieval). In R. Biswas-Diener & E. Diener (Eds), Noba textbook series: Psychology. Champaign, IL: DEF publishers. Retrieved from http://noba.to/bdc4uger). Thus, instead of unidirectional processing of information, psychologists can think of an interactive model of memory stages, (See Figure below) work on it, and talk about it. This can benefit billions of more students to come!

I have tried this approach successfully several times. Students scored significantly very high (p=.000) after they started using the method as against their normal ways of studying. One set of such studies has been published as ‘The Regulation of Consciousness in Information Processing’ in the “Journal of Indian Psychology”. Vol. 15, Nos. 1 & 2, Vishakapatnam, 1997.

More on this when I discuss ‘What psychologists don’t talk about Concentration?’

To summarize, Recognition, Recall, Redintegration, and Relearning are the four kinds of remembering that help us to retrieve information. The purpose of education is to strengthen these four kinds of remembering in students. If this was conveyed to the students, they would have had less trouble remembering during exams. And they would have applied this strategy even in their adult life enhancing their quality of life.

Suggestions and Recommendations

Hence, psychologists can start talking about the following:

1. Learning improves when the knowledge of Retrieving the information is provided to students.

2. Students can learn better through Recognition. If retrieving information is through recognition, then learning it can also be through recognition.

3. Students can learn better by using Recall as a source of information. Students don’t know why they are learning something. Suddenly they are asked a question in the examination; they may not be able to retrieve it. The best approach would be to always associate the type of questions with the information being given to the students.

4. Students can strategically map information to facilitate Redintegration. Students waste a lot of time thinking about the answer. This can be minimized if they are trained on how to store information and how to retrieve it.

5. Instead of losing information every year, students can benefit a lot by Relearning and thereby they can save a lot of time and effort. All it needs is to tell them that they are using the information in later years.

6. Remembering can help in encoding strategies and thereby increase the storage of information. All of them together will combine to strengthen the memory process.

Psychologists have missed an opportunity to help humankind by not talking about remembering. Imagine once again helping billions of students, millions of executives, teachers, and others by just telling them a few secrets they know. Don’t you think the benefit these people derive through this will restore mental hygiene in society?

Let us hope they start conveying this message at least from now on!

Know why I am doing a series on this?

What Psychologists Don’t Talk About?

As part of my “3C” initiative – “Clean Consciousness Campaign”, -- let me take up this challenge and let everyone know what psychologists don’t talk about?

Let me know if I am wrong. I have started this series because there are hundreds of things psychologists don’t talk about. I feel that it would benefit everyone if they did so. I hope at least now, they will make a beginning.

This is an attempt to bring to the fore what has been hidden for a very long time.