Peterson and Peterson - duration of STM

Cards (5)

  • Peterson & Peterson (1959)
    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 different intervals (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