Researchers who investigated the duration of short-term memory
Peterson & Peterson's study
1. Conducted a laboratory experiment
2. Sample of 24 psychology students
3. Recall meaningless three-letter trigrams
4. Prevent rehearsal by counting backwards
5. Recall letters at differentintervals (3, 6, 9, 12, 15 or 18 seconds)
The longer the interval, the less accurate the recall
At 3 seconds, around 80% of the trigrams were correctly recalled, whereas at 18 seconds only 10% were correctly recalled
Peterson & Peterson's conclusion
Short-term memory has a limited duration of approximately 18 seconds
If unable to rehearse information, it will not be passed to long-term memory, providing further support for the multi-store model and the idea of discrete components
