Learning and memory: a biological viewpoint

Education, such as that provided by interactions between parents, family members, and the general community, is the primary method of transmitting societyřs collective knowledge, or culture, from one generation to another. Education and, of course, teaching, are closely intertwined with human memory and learning, but there is a growing acceptance that learning and memory are features of all organisms as well as all inanimate objects, such as computers. Memory may, in fact, exist in any system that has structures and such memory may persist for a long time and affect the behaviour of such a system. In this study, a wide range of concepts relating to learning and memory is considered in order to determine whether such an wide-ranging approach has the potential to contribute to the development of models of instructional design that may be used in human education and teaching.