Sensory Memory
During every moment of an organism's life, sensory information is being taken in by sensory receptors and processed by the nervous system.The information people received which is stored in sensory memory is just long enough to be transferred to short-term memory. Humans have five main senses: sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch. Sensory memory (SM) allows individuals to retain impressions of sensory information after the original stimulus has ceased. A common demonstration of SM is a child's ability to write letters and make circles by twirling a sparkler at night. When the sparkler is spun fast enough, it appears to leave a trail which forms a continuous image. This "light trail" is the image that is represented in the visual sensory store known as iconic memory. The other two types of SM that have been most extensively studied are echoic memory, and haptic memory; however, it is reasonable to assume that each physiological sense has a corresponding memory store. Children for example have been shown to remember specific "sweet" tastes during incidental learning trials but the nature of this gustatory store is still unclear.
Read more about Sensory Memory: Characteristics, Relationship With Other Memory Systems
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