This increases the availability of certain memories and facilitates the redintegration process. An example would be a redintegration attempt for a word from a list of animal names. The semantic consistency of words evokes the memories associated with this matter, making the animal names more accessible in the memory. Contrarily, redintegration has been shown to be hindered for items sharing phonological features. This has been attributed to the “trace competition”, where errors in redintegration are caused by mistaking the items on the lists.
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Such representation can be retrieved from previous knowledge, facilitating the redintegration of item from the memory trace. The lexicality effect is commonly used to support the importance of long-term memory in the redintegration processes.
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The mechanism of redintegration is still not fully understood and is being actively researched.
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Phonotactic frequency effect refers to the pattern in memory redintegration, in which trace reconstruction is more accurate for items that contain phoneme combination that is frequently represented in the language. Though this effect is similar to the Word Frequency Effect, it can also explain patterns in redintegration of non-word items.
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Other factors which have been shown to facilitate redintegration include the ease of item imageability, familiarity with the language, and word concreteness.
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Redintegration was one of the memory phenomena that the Associationist school of philosophical psychologists sought to explain and used as evidence supporting their theories.
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Schweickert proposed that the redintegration of memory trace happens through two independent processes. In the lexical process, the memory trace is attempted to be converted into a word. In the phonemic process, the memory trace is attempted to be converted into a string of phenomes. Consequently, the probability of correct redintegration (R), becomes a function of L (lexical process) and/or P (phonemic process).
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Word frequency effect refers to the higher accuracy of redintegration processes for the words that are encountered more frequently in the language. This effect has been attributed to the differences in the availability of items stored in long-term memory. Frequently encountered words are hypothesized to be more accessible for subsequent recall, which facilitates the reconstruction of memory redintegration of the partially degraded trace.
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This issue was approached by Roodenrys and Miller (2008), whose alternative account of redintegration uses constrained Rasch model to portray trace degradation as a continuous process.
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These processes are autonomous, and their effect on R depends on whether they take place sequentially or non- sequentially. Schweickert’s explanation of trace redintegration is analogous to the processes hypothesized to be responsible for repairs of errors in speech. Though Schweickert indicates that the process of trace redintegration may be facilitated by the context of the situation in which recall takes place (e.g. syntax, semantics), his model does not provide details on the potential influences of such factors.
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The redintegration of memory traces may be affected by both semantic and phonological similarity of items which are to be recalled. Semantic similarity effect refers to the higher accuracy of redintegration for lists containing semantically homogenous items, than for those with semantically heterogeneous items. This has been attributed to the differences in the accessibility of different memories in the long-term store. When words are presented in semantically homogenous lists, other items may guide the trace reconstruction, providing a cue for item search.
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This effect could arise for example for the words auction (/ˈɔːkʃ(ə)n/) and audience (/ˈɔːdiəns/). The effect of phonological similarity on redintegration may differ depending on the position of phenomes shared within the items.
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The main criticism of Schweickert model concerns its discrete nature. The model treats memory in a binomial manner, where trace can be either intact, leading to correct recall, or partially decayed, with subsequent successful or unsuccessful redintegration. It does not explain the factors underlying the intactness, and cannot account for the differences in the number of incorrect attempts of recall of different items. Moreover, the model does not incorporate the concept of the degree of memory degradation, implying that the level of trace’s decay does not affect the probability of redintegration.
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Redintegration refers to the restoration of the whole of something from a part of it. The everyday phenomenon is that a small part of a memory can remind a person of the entire memory, for example, “recalling an entire song when a few notes are played.” In cognitive psychology the word is used in reference to phenomena in the field of memory, where it is defined as "the use of long-term knowledge to facilitate recall."Allen Baddeley (2007).
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In the study of item recall in working memory, memories that have partially decayed can be recalled in their entirety. It is hypothesized that this is accomplished by a redintegration process, which allows the entire memory to be reconstructed from the temporary memory trace by using the subject's previous knowledge. The process seems to work because of the redundancy of language. The effects of long-term knowledge on memory’s trace reconstruction have been shown for both visual and auditory presentation and recall.
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The great literary example of redintegration is Marcel Proust's novel Remembrance of Things Past. The conceit is that the entire seven-volume novel consists of the memories triggered by the taste of a madeleine soaked in lime tea. "I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her concoction of lime-flowers which my aunt used to give to me. Immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theatre to attach itself to the little pavilion, opening on to the garden, which had been built out behind it for my parents", ... for seven volumes.
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In 1841, Schopenhauer wrote a letter in English to Charles Lock Eastlake whose English translation of Goethe's book on colors had recently been reviewed in several journals. Schopenhauer included a copy of his On Vision and Colors with the letter. He briefly communicated the main point of his book as follows: > ...if, bearing in mind the numerical fractions, (of the activity of the > Retina) by which I express the 6 chief colours, You contemplate these > colours singly, then You will find that only by this, and by no other theory > on earth, You will come to understand the peculiar sensation, which every > colour produces in your eye, and thereby get an insight into the very > essence of every colour, and of colour in general. Likewise my theory alone > gives the true sense in which the notion of complementary colours is to be > taken, viz: as having no reference to light, but to the Retina, and not > being a redintegration [restoration] of white light, but of the full action > of the Retina, which by every colour undergoes a bipartition either in > yellow (3/4) and violet (1/4) or in orange (2/3) and blue (1/3) or in red > (1/2) and green (1/2).
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