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Long-Term Memory

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Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science
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Synonyms

Long-term storage; Long-term store

Definition

Long-term memory is thought to be of unlimited storage capacity and can hold information for a very long time.

Introduction

The ability to learn and remember is essential for survival. Over the course of an organism’s life, numerous events take place that have an impact on both the organism, its expectations for the future, and its ability to thrive. Although cases of tremendous ability to remember events have not been associated with great fortune or happiness (Parker et al. 2006), memory is an integral part of our personalities and our life stories. In this section, the nature of long-term memory (LTM) will be discussed in relation to the modal model of memory (Atkinson and Shiffrin 1968). It is now established that LTM is not a unitary structure in which all information is kept, but that it is a very diverse system involving different types of information and various brain areas (Squire 2004). Research has shed light onto the...

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Correspondence to Maria M Hadjimarkou .

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Hadjimarkou, M.M. (2021). Long-Term Memory. In: Shackelford, T.K., Weekes-Shackelford, V.A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19650-3_1108

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