the Multi-Store Model of Memory

• the three stores in the multi-store model 


  • sensory
  • short term store
  • long term store
• attention 


  the information from the environment that we notice and therefore gets passed from our sensory register to the STM
• maintenance rehearsal 


  occurs when we repeat materials to ourselves over and over in order to keep it in our STMs
• prolonged rehearsal 


  when we rehearse information for long enough that it passes into our LTM
• retrieval


  the process by which we transfer material back into our STM from our LTM so that we can recall it
• research evidence for the multi-store model 


  case study of HM (Scoville and Milner, 1957)
• sensory store 


  capacity= very large

  duration= limited (milliseconds)

  coding= sense specific (echoic-acoustic, iconic-visual, etc)
• short term store 


  capacity= limited (5-9 chunks)

  duration= very limited (18 seconds)

  coding= acoustic (sound)
• long term store 


  capacity= unlimited

  duration= lifetime/years

  coding= semantic (meaning)
• case study of HM (Scoville and Milner, 1957) 


  HM was a patient who suffered from epilepsy. he underwent brain surgery to relieve it, however the procedure was used in its infancy and not fully understood. crucially a part of his brain known as the hippocampus was removed from both sides of his brain. we now know this to be central to memory function. when his memory was assessed he could remember everything from before the surgery, but could not form new long-term memories. he would read the same magazine repeatedly without remembering it and he couldn’t record what he had eaten earlier the same day

  however, despite all this, he performed well on tests of immediate memory span, a measure of STM