Memory is one of the forms of reflection of the real world, consisting in fixing, preserving and subsequent reproducing of the experience by people. Thanks to the memory, people acquire the public experience and accumulate their own as well as acquire and use their knowledge, mind, skills and impressions about the world around. Among many abilities, which each normal person is gifted with, one of the major functions is an opportunity to fix, keep and reproduce the experience. This ability makes the memory function.
Memory is the major informative function. It creates the opportunity for education and development. Memory underlies the formation of speech, thinking, emotional reactions, locomotory skills, creative processes. Memory does not represent something uniform: it comprises a number of difficult processes. These are storing, preserving reproducing and forgetting.
Storing is fixing of those images and impressions which arise under the influence of subjects and reality in the course of feeling and perception. Storing is a necessary condition for receiving new knowledge and behavior forms by the individual, it is always selective.
Before starting to go to school, children are generally occupied with games, interesting to them. At this time, children remember easily and quickly what is interesting to them. It is noticed that children remember those verses, stories, pictures, events, which made a bigger impression on them and caused strong feelings, and they easily forget those things, which left them indifferent. The material, with which the child acts, is remembered with little effort. Along with brightness of the contents, the mood of the person, his/her interests, desires, emotions, expectations matter. The efficiency of storing increases if the cogitative activity joins in the course of perception. This is a condition of success for school students. Thus, mental work is a condition of strong remembering.
Any storing of the children, who have just started to go to school, is developed badly. The educational activity demands strong-willed efforts from the pupil to remember, to keep an educational material in memory irrespective of he/she is interested in it or not. The efficiency depends on the conditions, created by the teacher, and the ways, the child uses for remembering. The younger the children are, the bigger role the sensual perception plays. Therefore, the evident material should be used for remembering. Thus, models, manuals, pictures are necessary to use not only during the process of remembering but also during the process of reproducing.
Like all the processes, the process of memory can change in connection with the general development of the child. Mostly, the increase in the learning speed and the memory size growth belong to a number of such changes. For remembering the same material, a small child spends much more time and needs more repetitions than the children of the advanced age, and the latter spend more time than adults. The most essential changes happen in the process of the child’s development, it concerns the qualitative features of his/her memory.
The feelings have a very great impact on the speed and durability of remembering. Therefore, children easily remember songs, fairy tales and strong experiences.
Involuntary remembering plays a large role in the educational activity of the younger school student. Sometime later, it becomes more and more productive. The efficiency of any remembering lies in the fact that the memory volume increases; the child tells more details and retells the story more thoroughly. The involuntary remembering becomes more intelligent.
According to understanding of a remembered material, there can be two kinds of memories: intelligent (logical) and mechanical. The first kind of memory is based on understanding; the second one is based on a mechanical repetition. During the sensible remembering, the generalized communications, reflecting the essential parties and the relations take place; during the mechanical one, there are separate single communications, reflecting the insignificant parties. The researches show that the mechanical learning of the children as well as adults is less effective than the sensible one; it is more difficult to remember a senseless material at the children’s age. This results from the fact that learning without comprehension demands large strong-willed efforts, which is difficult for children. The efficiency of remembering depends on locomotorys, the child has to know for what he/she remembers the material and he/she should desire to achieve it.
To characterize the memory of a person, it is not enough to tell whether it is good or bad. Memory can be good in relation to some objects and bad in relation to others. There is an uncountable number of memory types. Though the majority of people have mixed types of memory, nevertheless one type always predominates, which distinguishes the classification.
Two main types of memory can be distinguished: photographic and verbal.
Photographic memory includes visual, acoustical, locomotory types of memory as well as an emotional memory — a special memory on feelings and experiences. However, the mixed type more often meets: visual and locomotory, visual and acoustical, acoustical and locomotory. The locomotory memory is expressed in remembering and reproducing movements, it is a basis for the development of motor skills (riding a bicycle, swimming and so on). All the skills are based on it; it becomes more and more difficult over time.
People with prevailing acoustical memory prefer to hear once than to see hundred times. If the person of the visual type wishes to remember a phone number, he/she tries to imagine it written, and the person with the locomotory type says it to him/herself or writes it in the air, the person with acoustical memory reproduces its intonational and rhythmic image.
The emotional memory is expressed in remembering and reproducing of feelings. It is an important condition of the locomotory human growth. The value of the emotional memory is that it increases the variety of emotional life of a person. The source of feelings becomes not only the present but also the past.
Short-term and long-term memories can also be distinguished. These two types of memory are defined by the time of preservation of a material. The types of memory have their age peculiarities. Originally, younger schoolchildren remember an evident material better: the subjects, which surround the children and with which they act, the images of the subjects, people. The duration of remembering of such a material is much higher than remembering of a verbal material.
As for the regularity of the verbal material, the children remember the words, designating the name of the subjects (a concrete material) better than the words, designating abstract concepts (an abstract material). The pupils keep in memory the concrete material, which is fixed in their memory with a support on evident samples, which is significant in understanding of what is remembered. They remember worse the concrete material, which has no support for an evident image (names on the geography not connected with the map, descriptions), which is not significant in understanding of what is remembered.
Involuntary remembering plays an essential role in the experience accumulation of younger school students, especially in the conditions of their vigorous activity. At this age, the evident and photographic memory has a primary value. This feature of younger school students is caused by an originality of other mental processes, mostly thinking. The children of this age start gaining abilities to think logically, to establish relationships of cause and effect and the relations between subjects and phenomena. However, they can do it only in relation to concrete, figuratively represented communications. Their thinking is characterized as concrete and figurative that defines the need of the accurate organization of the material transfer through a first-hand experience.