There is general agreement that MLU curves for chimpanzees learning American Sign Language are very similar to those for deaf human children. For effective retention of information in LTM, it is probably important the the information be intentionally recoded or processed. The phenomenon of recall of events while patients are undergoing surgery suggests that complex perceptual processes can occur in the absence of consciousness. Sentences may resemble each other at the deep structure level and have little resemblance in the surface structure. In a dichotic listening task, different information is presented to the person's two ears.
Encoding seems particularly vulnerable to problems among the elderly.
Essay exams measure retention by the method of recognition. A common goal of cognitive behavior modification is to teach clients to consider alternative conceptualizations of a troublesome situation. If you wanted to learn the names and locations of China's 15 most populous cities you would probably want to employ the technique of maintenance rehearsal. STM differs from LTM in terms of the capacity of the memory store. If you can't think of something now, but are able to remember it later, you experienced a failure of retention of information.