Families may remember their history or a particular salient event (e.g., a vacation in an exotic locale). Each of us has some sort of collective memory for any important social group to which we belong. To understand a country's memories is to grasp something essential about their national identity and outlook.
Individual memory is a straight-forward concept. It is one's personal memory of a previous experience. Collective memories are the remembering of the same experience, but not necessarily in the same way (for example, an adult may remember the experience differently than a child).
The study of the collective past involves the study of cognition, communication, and culture. The study of monuments, museums, street names, flags, media discourse, images, documentary, libraries, archives, and commemorative practices may entrench aspects of the collective past.
Halbwachs' most important contribution to the field of sociology came in his book La Mémoire collective, 1950 ("The Collective Memory"), in which he advanced the thesis that a society can have a collective memory and that this memory is dependent upon the "cadre" or framework within which a group is situated in a
Historical memories help form the social and political identities of groups of people and they can be changed with respect to present moments.
The term public memory refers to the circulation of recollections among members of a given community. A wide variety of artifacts give evidence of public memory, including public speeches, memorials, museums, holidays, and films.
We might put these concepts into a crude map by saying that "history" is an organized and evidence-based presentation of of the processes and events that have occurred for a people over an extended period of time; "memory" is the personal recollections and representations of individuals who lived through a series of
communicative memory contains memories referring to Vansina's "recent. past." These are the memories that an individual shares with his contem. poraries. This is what Halbwachs understood by "collective memory" and. what forms the object of oral history, that branch of historical research.
Durkheim focused more on social memory. Maurice Halbwachs - Maurice Halbwachs was a sociologist and a student of Durkheim. He coined the term collective memory.
National memory is a form of collective memory defined by shared experiences and culture. According to Lorraine Ryan, national memory is based on the public's reception of national historic narratives and the ability of people to affirm the legitimacy of these narratives.
Episodic memory is the name given to the capacity to consciously remember personally experienced events and situations. It is one of the major mental (cognitive) capacities enabled by the brain.
Psychologists distinguish between three necessary stages in the learning and memory process: encoding, storage, and retrieval (Melton, 1963). Encoding is defined as the initial learning of information; storage refers to maintaining information over time; retrieval is the ability to access information when you need it.
Semantic memory (SM) is a term used for the long-term memory store in which conceptual information is represented, including semantic (meaning) and lexical (word) information, as well as facts about the world (Bayles & Kaszniak, 1987; Tulving, 1972).
