Dr. J. Stephanie Gonzalez, PhD, BCBA-D, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Behavior Analysis at the University of North Texas and director of the Gonzalez Applied Behavior (GAB) Lab. She earned her doctorate in Behavior Analysis from the University of Florida. Her research spans translational and applied behavior analysis, assessment and treatment of recall skills, social validity of behavior analytic services, and the analysis of social interactions. Dr. Gonzalez is committed to rigorous, socially meaningful research and mentoring future behavior analysts. Outside the lab, she enjoys hiking with her family, watercolor, and reading fantasy and mystery books.
Memory is an ephemeral term that seems to explain everything (and maybe nothing) about learning. Behavior analysts will quickly tell you that memory is a construct, or a label we use to describe a pattern, and not a behavior. The behavior would be recalling, remembering, or accurately reporting events. Discussions on memory go hand in hand with the concept of forgetting. Is forgetting a failure of memory? Or an indicator of you being bad at remembering things? Sometimes I tell my best friend the same story multiple times and then embarrassingly apologize for repeating myself. Or she will tell me a story, and I will have no idea when that story happened. In either case, I’m quick to add, “My memory is so bad.” But is it? Maybe, but that framing misses all the nuance.
What Is “Good Memory?”
Before we dive into what bad memory is, let’s discuss what good memory might be. When someone is asked a question, “What did you do this weekend?” something very complex happens. You might respond with a movie you watched, a person you saw, or a good meal that you ate. The oddity in the response stems from the fact that you are discussing something that is no longer visible. The movie is over, the person is gone, and the meal is consumed. From a Skinnerian perspective, that response is an intraverbal, but it may also be a tact. In other words, it is both an answer to a question and a label for an event. But unlike a typical tact, the event is not physically present, so something else must be evoking the response. Palmer (1991) explains that, in this case, the speaker answering the question must engage in a series of responses to answer it. He describes this as a problem-solving response, in which you hear the question, and the conditional discriminations are resolved by attempting to “work through” the answer.
For example, you might think (in the first person) “the weekend was Saturday, but I had to work Saturday, so what did I do on Sunday? I was very tired, so I slept in and, RIGHT, I went to the movies because I had no energy to do anything else. I saw the Jurassic Park rerelease.” And voila, you produce the correct answer. Covert or overt, the behavior remains the same. All this problem-solving is a form of precurrent behavior (Skinner, 1984). Engaging in responses that produce stimuli which then evoke further responding closely resembles a behavior chain (Sargisson, 2023).
You might say, but there are moments when I randomly remember things without having to do all that. Or (and I hear this one a lot) what about people who do not think in their heads? To that I say, those are good points that do not discount this model of describing recall. For one, organisms respond rapidly. You do not think about applying the right amount of pressure when pressing the TV’s on button, but not enough to knock it off the stand. You do it because of a long history of responding that has shaped your behavior. In this case, you do not have to think through every one of those steps to recall something. The current environment, your history with the question, prior reinforcement contingencies, and recall strategies all influence your response. But overall, these responses are still behavior explainable by behavioral principles. Another way to think about all these possibilities is to view correct responding about an event in the past as a response class with an associated repertoire. Just like your “open the door” response class includes many different behaviors (e.g., turning a knob, pushing a door, pulling a door), you might remember with a variety of different strategies. We likely use many strategies to remember, learned throughout our lifetime.
Making “Bad Memory” Behavioral
So, what does a bad memory mean? We would never describe a child who is not potty-trained as having a bad memory for potty training. We will instead appeal to a reinforcer problem or a missing repertoire. It’s because you cannot solve bad memory. However, you can alter the reinforcer or the schedule or teach new skills. Nonetheless, describing ourselves as having a bad memory is a ubiquitous tact. I certainly do it all the time. Depending on how much time the person around me has, I will likely, insufferably, go into the same discussion I will continue here.
When an organism fails to respond to a stimulus that would typically evoke that response, we often ascribe a skill or performance deficit. Barring a few exceptions, a skill or performance deficit can explain almost all situations in which a stimulus does not evoke a response. In the case of a bad memory, we might say they have a skill deficit, lacking the problem-solving repertoire I described above. Or we might say they have a performance deficit, in that the consequences do not sustain the response. But it is important to note another skill deficit, which I will illustrate with an example. If I ask, “Qué hiciste este fin de semana?” some of you readers could answer the question, and some of you could not. It would be remiss of me to say that those of you who cannot respond have a recall problem or a problem-solving repertoire problem. Because when I change the stimulus to “What did you do this weekend?” most of you can now respond. I avoid saying “all of you can respond” because some of you might have a problem-solving or recall issue. Or there may be no history of reinforcement for responding to a written prompt in a blog post, a performance deficit. The deficit is not an inability to “remember.” It reflects a lack of learning history relative to the stimuli meant to evoke the response.
Don’t Believe Me, Believe the Research
And that distinction is important. It alters how we might approach helping someone improve their reporting accuracy. One common method of memory testing is asking people what they remember. That severely limits our ability to test memory in organisms without vocal verbal behavior. For example, animals lack a vocal verbal repertoire. Lacking a vocal verbal repertoire should not be confused with lacking a verbal repertoire. While we cannot ask them in our language to tell us about their day, animals have incredibly complex communication networks (Araiba, 2025; shoutout to another ABAI blog with an incredible discussion on this). However, researchers who cannot ask animals what they remember have devised other ways to test their memory. For example, Clayton and Dickinson (1998) developed a method to assess episodic memory in scrub jays. Episodic memory specifies behavior in which organisms remember an event in the past, including what they did, where it happened, and when it happened. Typically, this is assessed by asking an organism. However, Clayton and Dickinson found that when scrub jays (Figure 1) cache perishable (mealworms) and nonperishable foods (seeds), they retrieve the worms after short delays and the seeds after longer delays. They remembered what they had cached, where they had cached it, and when they had cached it. (Admittedly, I was delighted to have a reason to include a photo of a bird; did you know birds are dinosaurs? Fun fact.)
Figure 1
California Scrub-jay
Note. California, Scrub, Jay image. From Pixabay, by Michael Barry. Free for use. Sourced: https://pixabay.com/photos/california-scrub-jay-golden-9490284/
In a similar vein, Hayne and Imuta (2011) had some concerns regarding testing episodic memory in children. They theorized that existing developmental research suggesting that episodic memory develops around the age of 4 might be confounded by the fact that this is also when complex question-answering abilities are typically learned. They wondered whether 3-year-olds cannot remember or, instead, lack the verbal repertoire to answer a who, what, and where question. Inspired by Clayton and Dickinson (1998), they developed a test that could assess episodic memory in children without a question-answering repertoire. In their test, participants hid several toys. After a delay, they asked participants what toy they hid, where they hid it, and in what order they hid it (when). The clever part is that after asking the questions, they had participants try to find the toys, an almost equivalent test of memory. They found that both 3-year-olds and 4-year-olds found the toys at similar rates, but 4-year-olds did much better at answering questions. In other words, when verbal responses to questions are not used as a measure of memory, 3-year-olds and 4-year-olds remember past events equivalently, with some exceptions. 3-year-olds could remember, but they did not have the verbal repertoire to describe that remembering. With that information, it would make sense to focus on teaching children to respond to questions rather than on strategies to remember. Just like you only need to learn what the earlier phrase in Spanish means, not some problem-solving strategy you can already do. Otherwise, we might try to intervene to address a 3-year-old’s recall failure with strategies they do not need.
The Real Solution to Bad Memory is Assessment and Treatment
The real point of this discussion is that treating recall deficits requires assessment, just as treating any other behavioral concern. There can be issues with teaching a memory strategy without a proper assessment. One strategy to improve recall is using a mnemonic. A mnemonic is a pattern of words used to remember something. A classic example is ROY G. BIV, which helps us remember the colors of the rainbow. Belleza (1981) noted that mnemonics created by a learner were more effective at improving recall than mnemonics created by someone else and then taught to the learner. I will make a logical leap that, for now, lacks empirical support. Teaching a recall strategy that conflicts with an existing remembering repertoire might reduce its effectiveness. For example, if a child has already developed a strategy for remembering, such as a mnemonic, trying to teach them a new strategy, such as rehearsal, might be counterproductive. This is a terrible example, as most research supports that mnemonics are better at aiding recall than rehearsal, but the point stands. While still an empirical question, the potential efficacy risks associated with teaching unnecessary memory strategies suggest that we need significantly more research on the assessment and treatment of recall. We need to know what our participants can already do.
However, the conversation must stay nuanced. If you learn that a child can report on what they did, only if you offer them a trip to their favorite restaurant every day, that may be a performance deficit, but it will not be the best treatment option. Frankly, it might be an impossible treatment option! In that case, it might make sense to adopt a behavioral strategy that reduces the effort of remembering, such as taking notes during the day and reciting in the evening. A lower response effort might increase accuracy with less potent reinforcers. So, while we should test for these potential reasons for a recall deficit, we must still maintain our strong, conceptually systematic approach to assessment and treatment, a hallmark of behavior analysis.
The conversation about bad memory as a performance or a skill deficit is only one part of a complex discussion of how we discuss recall responses. The critical point to recognize is that memory, or, really, the associated behaviors, are well within a behavior-analytic framework. Sargisson’s (2023) chapter presents a fantastic summary that further elaborates on this point, with examples spanning basic, applied, and non-behavior-analytic literature, while still focusing on the behavioral principles aligned with this conversation. Overall, there is little value in describing yourself as having a “bad memory” when reinforcement history and stimulus control provide a far more useful explanation. If you take one thing away from this blog, let it be this: calling something “bad memory” closes the door on assessing all the variables involved in a response. And assessing is where behavior analysts do some of their best work.
References
Araiba, S. (2025, November 5). A wonderful world of animal verbal behavior. Behavior
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Bellezza, F. S. (1981). Mnemonic devices: Classification, characteristics, and criteria. Review of
Educational Research, 51(2), 247-275. https://doi.org/10.3102/003465430510022
Clayton, N. S., & Dickinson, A. (1998). Episodic-like memory during cache recovery by scrub
jays. Nature, 395(6699), 272-274. https://doi.org/10.1038/26216
Hayne, H., & Imuta, K. (2011). Episodic memory in 3‐and 4‐year‐old children. Developmental
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Palmer, D. C. (1991). A behavioral interpretation of memory. In L. J. Hayes & P. N.
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Skinner, B. F. (1984). An operant analysis of problem solving. Behavioral and Brain
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