{
  "id": "memory.cognitive",
  "term": "memory",
  "sense": "cognitive",
  "pos": "noun",
  "status": "review",
  "level": 20,
  "arena": "everyday",
  "domain": "common",
  "style": null,
  "definition": "the ability of a person to keep information about previous events and retrieve it later",
  "folk_gloss": null,
  "emergence": {
    "components": [
      "ability.capacity",
      "information.knowledge",
      "event.occurrence",
      "find.search",
      "keep.maintenance",
      "people.social",
      "previous.temporal",
      "time.dimension",
      "later.temporal"
    ],
    "interaction": "The capacity to persist knowledge of past events enables retrieval when sought by a person.",
    "novel_properties": [
      "temporal persistence of knowledge",
      "recall on demand",
      "integration of retention and access"
    ]
  },
  "examples": [
    {
      "text": "The Voyager 1 probe retains navigation data in radiation-hardened memory since 1977, still functioning at over 24 billion kilometers from Earth.",
      "domain": "engineering"
    },
    {
      "text": "The hippocampus in London taxi drivers shows enlarged gray matter after memorizing complex city routes for the Knowledge exam.",
      "domain": "biology"
    },
    {
      "text": "The Internet Archive saves snapshots of web pages, like the first Google homepage from 1998, retrievable decades later.",
      "domain": "computing"
    }
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "id": "ability.capacity",
      "type": "is-a",
      "note": "memory is a kind of ability"
    },
    {
      "id": "information.knowledge",
      "type": "enables",
      "note": "memory enables the use of stored information"
    }
  ],
  "used_by": [
    "remember.cognitive"
  ],
  "forms": [
    "memories",
    "memory"
  ],
  "closed": false,
  "provenance": {
    "author": "openrouter:openai/gpt-oss-120b",
    "date": "2026-07-29",
    "confidence": 0.6,
    "reconciled": {
      "by": "openrouter:qwen/qwen3-235b-a22b-2507",
      "date": "2026-07-31",
      "changed": "components",
      "note": "Added missing 'later.temporal' (L5) to components, as the definition explicitly references retrieval 'later'. No change to definition needed."
    }
  },
  "canonical": "https://emergencemachine.com/tools/lexicon/what-is-the-meaning-of-memory.cognitive"
}