Psychology of Memory.

In order to understand the errors of memory, we must proceed, as in the case of illusions of perception, by examining a little into the nature of the normal or correct process.

An act of recollection is said by the psychologist to be purely representative in character, whereas perception is partly representative, partly preservative.  To recall an object to the mind is to reconstruct the percept in the absence of a sense-impression.[112]

An act of memory is obviously distinguished from one of simple imagination by the presence of a conscious reference to the past.  Every recollection is an immediate reapprehension of some past object or event.  However vague this reference may be, it must be there to constitute the process one of recollection.

The every-day usages of language do not at first sight seem to consistently observe this distinction.  When a boy says, “I remember my lesson,” he appears to be thinking of the present only, and not referring to the past.  In truth, however, there is a vague reference to the fact of retaining a piece of knowledge through a given interval of time.

Again, when a man says, “I recollect your face,” this means, “Your face seems familiar to me.”  Here again, though there is no definite reference to the past, there is a vague and indefinite one.

It is plain from this definition that recollection is involved in all recognition or identification.  Merely to be aware that I have seen a person before implies a minimum exercise of memory.  Yet we may roughly distinguish the two actions of perception and recollection in the process of recognition.  The mere recognition of an object does not imply the presence of a distinct representative or mnemonic image.  In point of fact, in so far as recognition is assimilation, it cannot be said to imply a distinct act of memory at all.  It is only when similarity is perceived amid difference, only when the accompaniments or surroundings of the object as previously seen, differencing it from the object as now seen, are brought up to the mind that we may be said distinctly to recall the past.  And our state of mind in recognizing an object or person is commonly an alternation between these two acts of separating the mnemonic image from the percept and so recalling or recollecting the past, and fusing the image and the percept in what is specifically marked off as recognition.[113]

Although I have spoken of memory as a reinstatement in representative form of external experience, the term must be understood to include every revival of a past experience, whether external or internal, which is recognized as a revival.  In a general way, the recallings of our internal feelings take place in close connection with the recollection of external circumstances or events, and so they may be regarded as largely conditioned by the laws of this second kind of reproduction.