Short and long term memory

• short-term memory

  (Working memory) Immediate memory for occuring events. Measured in seconds and minutes as opposed to hours and days. The memories are displaced or disappear if not rehearsed.
• long-term memory

  Long term memory for past experiences or events. It’s duration is potentially unlimited as well as its capacity.
• capacity of STM

  Joseph Jacobs found the average span for recall of digits was 9 and 7 for letters, thus the capacity of STM is said to be 7± 2 items. Ppts told a digit/letter and repeated it back immediately, more digits/letters added to the letter sequence.
• capacity of LTM

  Potentially unlimited
• duration of STM

  Peterson and Peterson - consonant syllable and three digit number. Recall it after retention intervals of increasing seconds, while counting down from the number. only 2% were correct after 18 seconds, thus STM has a duration of around 18 seconds if rehearsal is prevented.
• duration of LTM

  People of various ages tested on ability to recall the memories of former classmates. After 48 years 70% could recall using photo recognition but only 30% could recall after 48 years in free recall.
• how is long-term memory encoded?

  semantically
• memory: the ability to encode, retain and retrieve information based on past knowledge and experience.
• Short term memory is encoded acoustically because acoustic confusion occurs with similar sounding words, ans different sounding words are remembered better.
• long term memory is encoded semantically as letters that are semantically similar are harder to recall from LTM than those that are dissimilar.
• How is short-term memory encoded?

  acoustically