duration

• P: another criticism of research investigating STM is that it is artificial

  E: trying to memorise consonant syllables does not truly reflect most everyday memory activities where what we are trying to remember is meaningful. However, we do sometimes try to remember fairly meaningless things, such as groups of numbers or letters

  L: this means that, although the task was artificial, the study does have some relevance to everyday life
• P: a criticism of the petersons' study is that it did not actually measure what it set out to measure

  E: in petersons' study participants were counting the numbers in their STM and this may displace the syllables to be remembered. Reitman used auditory tones instead of numbers so that displacement wouldn't occur and found that the duration of STM was longer.

  L: this suggests that forgetting in the pertersons' study was due to displacement rather than decay