Psychology

This is a research paper that looks in detail at the subject of memory for temporal order. Here we will look at what temporal order is and the factors that influence it. We are also going to look at the other activities that involve the mind i.e. intention, memory and vision. This is an important research because it explains why some people behave the way they do in terms of memory and helps psychologists to establish what the best course of action is. Additionally it will highlight on the role of the medial prefrontal cortex and cortex perirhinal, the role of passage of time and how it affects memory and the involvement of some parts of the body in matters to do with memory. I would also like to establish whether age and maturity influences the memory capacity of an individual. Alongside this, I intend to find out whether sleep alters the memory capacity in any way. In conducting this research, I will be using both primary and secondary sources.

For the primary sources, I will be using questionnaires for samples of people categorized under various age groups. I will interview them and the results that I get will represent the whole population of people from within the respective age groups. In this regard I will use 10 questionnaires whereby two questionnaires will be used by age bracket i.e. that of 11-20year olds, 21-30 year olds, 31-40 year olds, 41-50 year olds and 51-60 year olds. The people under this age brackets will be interviewed in regard to their health, how they feel about life and also how busy they are. As for the secondary source, I will majorly use works by other writers like Drosopoulos et al whose title of the  paper he wrote is Sleep Enforces the Temporal Order in Memory.

To start with is the definition of memory temporal order which is the sequence of arrangement of information. There are two ways of looking at memory, the first is the object being remembered and secondly the action itself. Mental events and the amount of time between them is what create the temporal aspect of memory. When there is an intention to do something the intentional object is not yet actualized, while in memory or in the act of remembering the object of intention has already been actualized.  Vision is also another aspect of the mind which involves some parts of the body. It is about the neural circuitry, corcels in the retina of the eye and the aspects of the environment in case of color perception. Whereas visual perceptions can only be explained by the physical dimensions surrounding the object, memory on the contrary is explained by the temporal gap.

Memory can either be semantic or episodic. Semantic memory is whereby we remember what we have gone through mentally e.g. desires or hallucinations while episodic memory is where we remember things that have happened to us. What brings the difference between semantic and episodic memory is the manner of storage of the object of memory or what aspect of the object is encoded.

Findings from studies carried out on the role of the perirhinal cortex and the medial prefrontal cortex suggest that both of these organs, through some kind of interaction, are useful in the retrieval of information that is useful in the temporal order memory of long term objects. Further the studies imply that only the perirhinal cortex contributes to retrieval of information necessary for long-term object recognition. Another organ that affects memory is the hiccompus.The Hippocampus influences the manner in which information is stored and the sequence that is followed. Elements in the sequence are bound together in heteroassociative networks so that an individual is able to remember events as they happen. Without this part of the body an individual cannot be able to remember the things that happen immediately, he can only remember the things that happened a long time ago before the hippocampus was destroyed.

This explains why some accident victims with head injuries are not able to remember things that are happening to them seconds and minutes away from the time of the accident, and yet can remember things that happen long before the accident since by then the hippocampus was in perfect shape.
Advancement of age and maturity definitely comes with such problems as memory difficulties which can be as a result of the altering of either short-term or long-term memory storage. According to, age related changes do not make the dimensions of short-term memory to be equally vulnerable. Vulnerability of source memory also increases with age and more specifically short-term memory.

For this paper I used the APA(American Psychological Association) format for both in text referencing as the bibliography. This is for the purposes of supporting the contents of this paper. In APA referencing, I made sure that the page numbers are on the top right of the pages and next to the page numbers I included a title or page header. The first page has information of the author that is the name and institution, the name of the instructor and the class. This referencing assists me to give credit to those authors whose works I used and will help the reader with further reference.  Citing in the text required that add the authors name then the year of publication in brackets. As for the Bibliography the list of names of authors are arranged in alphabetical order.