Abstract
Human memory is so pragmatic and economical that it is unreasonable to assume that the various cognitive activities that supposedly facilitate memory have discrete and mutually independent causes. Accordingly, this paper first reviews previous studies concerning levels of processing, processing resources, and encoding variability and specificity, and suggests that the mechanisms governing these processes can be uniformly and simply explained by the single notion of activation. Secondly, this study explores the theoretical possibility of accounting for elaboration, the strengthening of retrieval routes, contextual effects, and spacing effects with this notion, and demonstrates that, in all cases, the amount of activation offers a coherent explanation for the degree of memory facilitation. Finally, experimental results are presented that indicate how differences in processing depth can be explained in terms of differences in the amount of activation, with the author describing how a new experiment was conducted to explore the possibility that the difference between maintenance and elaborative rehearsal can also be accounted for by differences in the amount of activation. This hypothesis is supported by obtained results, and, in conclusion, it is suggested that the amount of activation is the universal cause of the various cognitive activities that facilitate memory.
