Anterograde amnesia is memory loss for events that transpired following immediately after trauma. Retrograde amnesia refers to memory loss for events that preceded the traumatic event.

Elizabeth Loftus has had a long and distinguished career studying eyewitness memory and the creation of false memories. In one of her well-known experiments, participants remembered the speed of a car as being faster or slower depending on the wording of the question. In another experiment, she demonstrated that about 25 percent of people could be convinced that they remembered being lost in a mall as a small child, even though this event never actually happened to them. 

“Anterograde amnesia” is caused by damage to the hippocampus and results in the inability to create new memories. “Retrograde amnesia” is also caused by damage to the hippocampus, but is characterizes with the inability to remember anything that occurred before a certain time. These individuals can still form new memories. “Amnesia” is too general of term and is incorrect. Last, “echoic memory” is not associated with forgetting information. 

Episodic memory (i.e. memories of lived experiences), together with semantic memory (i.e. known facts), forms the category explicit memory. Explicit memories are available for conscious reflection and can be called up and described. The other three choices are all types of implicit memory, or memory that is drawn upon outside of conscious awareness. Procedural memory refers to the knowledge of how to perform physical actions. Priming refers to the unintended influence of frequent or recent experiences. Classically conditioned learning refers to trained associations between frequently paired stimuli.

George Miller’s research on short-term memory established that humans are typically limited to dealing with “seven plus or minus two” pieces of information at one time. Noam Chomsky is most famous for theorizing universal grammar and language acquisition. George Lakoff’s work concerns the relationship between cognition and metaphor. Stanley Milgram is a social psychologist, controversial for his work on obedience.

In the field of psychology, the spacing effect is the phenomenon in which humans more easily remember items when they are spaced out over a long period of time as opposed to repeatedly studied in a short period of time.

"Procedural memory" refers to a memory of “knowing how.” If you can ride a bike, then you might not be able to word-for-word verbalize your memory of how to do so; therefore, "semantic memory" is not the best choice. Psychologists would also distinguish between remembering how to ride a bike and remembering when you learned to ride a bike—the latter would be considered "episodic memory." Additionally, "short term memory" refers to information held immediately in consciousness for a very brief time, often in order to carry out a certain task, which is then lost if not transferred to long term memory.  The general knowledge of riding a bike would not be permanently stored in short term memory.

In the information processing theory of memory, "encoding" must precede both storage and retrieval. Rehearsal is only essential in short term memory, but also must follow encoding. The process of encoding is essential to transferring perception into memory, so it must occur first. 

"Anterograde amnesia" describes the condition in which an individual is unable to create or retain new memories following a specific incident. For Cameron, this specific moment is the car crash. It is where his long term memory ends and he loses the ability to add more information to this collection. He is unable to recall the recent past, in contrast with his vivid recollection of the time before the accident. 

The primacy effect and the recency effect are termed the "serial position effects". The primacy effect is a phenomenon that allows one to remember information better that is initially presented to them (e.g., the beginning contents of a long list). The recency effect refers to the ability to better recall information presented last (e.g., information presented at the end of a long list).