Final answer:
In general, people and speakers remember some parts of what they have said or done. Ebbinghaus's forgetting curve and factors like encoding failure and storage decay contribute to our selective memory retention. Contextual encoding can help in retaining and recalling information.
Step-by-step explanation:
Autobiographical Memory and Forgetting
In general, people remember and the speaker (sender) remembers some parts of what they say and do. This is related to how episodic or autobiographical memory functions. True, some individuals like the American actress Marilu Henner may have a highly superior autobiographical memory and can remember an extraordinary amount. For the majority of us, details such as what we wore on a specific date years ago or what we ate for a particular meal are lost. This is partly due to the phenomenon of forgetting which includes encoding failure and storage decay.
German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus's research demonstrated our memory's 'forgetting curve,' showing a quick loss of learned information over time, with 50% of information lost after just 20 minutes and significantly more within 24 hours. Furthermore, our sensory memory filters out non-essential information, and what is not deemed valuable does not even reach our short-term memory.
Another aspect affecting memory is transience, which refers to the fading of memories over time. This is visible when we attempt to recall details of books we've read long ago, like in the case study where a mother could not remember the plot of 'To Kill a Mockingbird.' New information is more likely to be remembered when it's encoded meaningfully, providing context to our experiences and assisting with recall.