Multi store model

• Credibility - lots of research

  • Research into primary/recency effect and rehearsal
  • Miller - found STM has capacity of 7 items of information comfortably but struggles to hold more than 9
  • Found that information can be grouped into chunks but loses accuracy.
  • Glanzer and Cunitz - Asked pps to recall list of words
  • Found that they remember beginning/end of list and fewer from middle
  • Because primary words are rehearsed and encoded into LTM, middle words are displaced
• Objections - Lacks ecological validity

  • Brown-Peterson technique - Blocking rehearsal by doing an interference task like counting backwards in threes or learning useless three-letter trigrams
  • Learning useless trigrams is artificial
  • In real life memory is used to recall important information and if forgotten then consequences
  • Won't explain how memory works in real life situations
• Differences - Similarities with Working memory model

  • Working memory model replaces STM and provides more detailed explanation of rehearsal and retrieval from LTM
  • WMM suggests phonological loop is responsible for rehearsal process
  • Central executive directs attention from relevant information stored in LTM and brings into working memory for processing
  • One difference is WMM is a model still developing whereas the MSM is fixed