Explain how biological factors may affect one cognitive process

Memory is essential to human beings. It’s not only the brain’s main function, but is also used everyday without us noticing: we acquire new information, store it, retain it and might retrieve it if needed. It’s thanks to memory and its three main stages: encoding, storage and retrieval, that humans can operate and recall events and information on a daily basis with no difficulty or effort whatsoever. In 1960, it was claimed that there was more than one memory system. Researchers Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968) suggested ‘the multistore model’, consisting of the three key types of memory stores: the sensory store, the short-term store (STS) and the long-term store (LTS). In
Wearing is still capable of playing the piano and conducting music he already knew prior to the illness, as these skills are part of his implicit memory. The fact that he can still play shows evidence of a distributed memory system, meaning memory is not only linked to one part of the brain. His emotional memory remained intact, shown by the way he greets his wife every time he sees her.
When taking an MRI of his brain, damage can be seen in not only the hippocampus, but also in some areas of the frontal regions.
Clive Wearing’s case shows evidence about the biological foundation of different memory systems. For example, the damage seen at the hippocampus and the frontal regions could indicate that his retrograde amnesia and be explained as a trauma that interrupts the consolidation of memory.

The third case I’m going to look at is the Sperry study. In the 1900s, there was a suspicion involving the brain having the ‘language centre’ in the left hemisphere and thanks to people with certain brain injuries, this was proven. Researchers and psychologists noticed that people with lesions in specific areas in the left hemisphere lost their ability of speech. In 1968, Roger Sperry discovered evidence for this study. He used ‘split-brain’ patients and carried out many experiments to discover the usage of the right and left hemispheres.
In the 1960s, people who suffered from a specific kind of epilepsy had