minnesåtkomsten

Minnesåtkomsten, literally "memory access" in Swedish, is a term used to describe the process of retrieving information stored in memory. In Swedish academic usage it appears in both cognitive sciences and computer science, but with different meanings.

In cognitive psychology, minnesåtkomsten denotes the act of retrieving information from memory. Retrieval is influenced by encoding quality, retrieval cues, and context. Tasks include free recall, cued recall, and recognition. The efficiency of minnesåtkomsten depends on the strength of memory traces, interference from related memories, and the availability of effective retrieval cues. Theories such as encoding specificity and pattern completion describe how cues match stored representations. Working memory interacts with long-term memory during retrieval, and retrieval practice or spaced repetition can enhance access.

In computer science, minnesåtkomsten refers to the process by which a processor accesses data in memory storage hierarchies. Access time is affected by the location of data (registers, caches, main memory) and by memory bandwidth. Cache hits are fast; misses require longer cycles to fetch data from slower layers. Concepts such as locality of reference, caching strategies, memory interleaving, and prefetching govern minnesåtkomsten and overall system performance. Different memory types (SRAM caches, DRAM main memory, non-volatile memory) have distinct latency and throughput characteristics.

The term thus covers two domains: human memory retrieval and machine memory access. In both, effective strategies to improve access include optimizing encoding and retrieval cues for humans, and designing memory hierarchies and access patterns for computers.