What is short term memory?
Short term memory stores and allows recall of information for a period of several seconds.
What is long term memory?
Stores and enables us to recall information from the more distant past.
In which 3 ways are STM and LTM different?
Duration, capacity and encoding
What is duration?
A measure of how long information can be stored for or how long it lasts.
Who investigated the duration of STM?
Peterson and Peterson.
What were the results of Peterson and Peterson’s study?
Evaluate Peterson and Peterson’s study on the duration of STM.
Strengths
1) It is a lab experiment where variables can be tightly controlled e.g how many trigrams are presented. The procedure can also be replicated to test if results are reliable.
Weaknesses
1) Trigrams are unrealistic things to remember. Therefore it has low ecological validity.
2) Trigrams presented on earlier trials may have cause confusion when participants came to remember trigrams in later trials.
Who investigated the duration of LTM?
Bahrick et al.
- Tested how well about 400 American participants could remember their former classmates by asking them to identify pictures, matching names to pictures.
What were the results of Bahrick’s study?
Evaluate Bahrick et al’s study.
Strengths
- This was a natural experiment with meaningful material so has higher ecological validity because remembering names is an everyday task.
Weaknesses
What is capacity?
A measure of how much information can be held or stored.
How did Jacobs investigate the capacity of the STM?
What were the results of Jacobs study?
Evaluate Jacob’s study.
What did Miller conclude?
- He also said that memory capacity can be increased through a process called chunking.
Which 3 possible ways can information be coded?
How did Baddely investigate coding?
What were the results of Baddely’s experiment?
Evaluate Baddely’s experiment.
Who first introduced the multi-store model?
Atkinson and Shiffrin in 1968
What are the 3 unitary stores of the multi-store model?
1) Sensory register or sensory memory
2) Short term memory
3) Long term memory
What does the multi-store model work?
1) Information is detected by the sense organs and enters the sensory memory.
2) If attended to this, information enters the STM.
3) Information from the STM is transferred to the LTM only if that information is rehearsed.
4) If rehearsal does not occur, then information is forgotten, lost from STM through the processes of displacement or decay.
What are the 5 separate sensory stores?
1) Iconic store- Where visual images are kept for a short period.
2) Echoic store- Where auditory senses are kept for a short period.
3) Haptic store- Retains physical senses of touch and internal muscle tensions.
4) Gustatory store: Related to taste information
5) Olfactory store: Related to smell
What is the duration of the sensory register?
Less than half a second (250 milliseconds)