MSM psychologists

• Sperling - duration of sensory register


  • individuals could only recall the letters if the tone was sounded within one third of a second following the display of the letters
  • if the tone was heard after the memory had faded, they could not recall the letters.
  • this suggests that information decays rapidly and has a short duration
• Glanzer and Cunitz


  • serial position effect - when asking people to remember a list of words which is greater than the capacity of short term memory they have a tendency to remember words from the beginning and end of the list
• Case Study - HM


  • Surgery for severe epilepsy, removed a small part of his brain called the Hippocampus
  • STM was intact but unable to make new memories in LTM
  • Supports the idea of two separate memory stores