Coding, Capacity and Duration

• Short-term memory - The limited capacity memory store. In STM, coding is mainly acoustic, capacity is between 5 and 9 items on average, duration is about 18 seconds.
• Long-term Memory - The permanent memory store. In LTM, coding is mainly semantic, it has unlimited capacity and can store memories for up to a lifetime.
• Coding - The format in which information is stored in the various memory stores.
• Capacity - The amount of information that can be held in a memory store.
• Duration - The length of time information can be held in memory
• Information is store in memory in different forms, depending on the memory store. The process of converting information between different forms is called coding.
• Baddeley gave different lists of words to four groups of participants to remember (acoustically similar and dissimilar, semantically similar and dissimilar). Participants were asked to recall the words in the correct order. STM did worse with acoustically similar and LTM did worse with semantically similar.
• Jacobs measured capacity by getting participants to recite digits out loud in the correct order, until the participant can no longer do it correctly. Jacobs found that the mean span for digits across all participants was 9.3 items and letters were 7.3