THE PHYSIOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE PROBLEM 

 OF RECENT MEMORY 



Jerzy Konorski 



It is a striking fact that the investigations of higher nervous activity of 

 animals carried out both in physiological laboratories by methods of 

 conditioned reflexes, and in psychological laboratories by use of such 

 other methods as maze learning, discrimination box, etc., have been 

 almost exclusively concerned with the problem of stable memory. In 

 fact, in all these investigations the animal is routinely trained to perform a 

 particular task or a set of tasks and then various properties of the acquired 

 reactions, or the very process of their acquisition, are studied. But it is 

 easy to conceive that the performance of the more or less firmly estab- 

 lished conditioned responses, in the broadest sense of the word, and, of 

 course, unconditioned responses, does not exhaust the whole behaviour 

 of the animal. We know from everyday observation of animals and man 

 that a large part of this behaviour is often based on transient memory 

 traces which persist for some time and then are partially or even totally 

 abolished. Recently the clear realization of a probable difference between 

 the mechanisms of stable and transient memory traces has turnec^ the 

 attention of investigators to the latter category of phenomena and has 

 given an impetus to their studies. 



I intend in the present paper to present a brief review of the methods 

 used so far in the study of phenomena of recent memory, to propose some 

 new methods which may be applied in this field, to examine the relations 

 between stable and recent memory and to discuss the problems of a 

 probable physiological mechanism of recent memory, versus that of 

 stable memory. 



I. TRACE CONDITIONED REFLEXES 



As a matter of fact, the phenomena of recent memory have been 

 implicated for a long time in some conditioned reflex (CR) studies, 

 although their significance in this respect was not clearly understood. I 

 have in mind the so-called trace CRs which were studied by several 

 research- workers of the Pavlov school (Pimenov, 1907; Grossman, 1909; 

 Dobrovolskij, 1911; Feokritova, 1912; Pavlova, 1914) in the first decade 



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