multi store model

• Information enters the sensory memory from the environment through your sense, it has a limited capacity of 4 items and a duration of <1 second and so information is rapidly lost. If the information is important enough, we pay attention to it and it moves to the short-term memory without attention, the information is lost by decay. For example, if a teacher is giving instructions and you are not paying attention then it will not be processed by the echoic store and therefore no change of transferring to STM.
• Once the information moves to the short-term memory, maintenance rehearsal is needed to keep it in your short-term memory, and it only has a capacity of 7 items + or – 2 items and a duration of 15-30 seconds. For example, if learning a set of dance moves from a video, the number of moves that can be learned at a time may be limited to 5-9 so if you don’t pause the video at this point, the first moves are likely to be forgotten. Additionally, if the moves are not practiced immediately and repeated then they will be quickly forgotten after around 30 seconds.
• Information in the STM is encoded acoustically through active recall and elaborative rehearsal, the information moves to the LTM.
• It can also be maintained in STM through maintenance rehearsal e.g., repeating it to yourself. For example, if you’re trying to remember a phone number and you don’t have a pen to write it down them repeating it to yourself will maintain the information in your STM. If this is done enough times you may learn a pattern or rhythm to the numbers and this elaboration may be enough to transfer it to LTM. If information is not rehearsed, it’s forgotten by decay or displacement.
• Through rehearsal, information moves to the long-term memory where it is encoded semantically for example, when students revise for their exams, topics which they understand better or are meaningful to them personally are more likely to be encoded deeply and therefore will be recalled better.
• LTM has an unlimited capacity that lasts your whole life for example someone in their 80’s will still be able to clearly remember events from their childhood and throughout their lives. However, it can be lost by decay or interference. To bring information back to the short-term memory from the long-term memory, elaborative retrieval is needed.
• One strength of this theory is that there’s supporting evidence to show that there’s a difference in how the different memory stores encode information.
• strength = . In Baddeley’s experiment, he tested participants on semantically similar/ dissimilar and acoustically similar/ dissimilar words and found that participants did worse on acoustically similar words for short term memory tests but wasn’t a problem for long-term memory tests. This is a strength as it provides evidence that the short term store and the long term store are separate and process memories differently, showing how short-term memory is encoded acoustically and long-term memory is encoded semantically.
• A weakness is that multi-store models description of short-term memory may be too simplistic by suggesting that it is a unitary store, only processed acoustically and only moves into the long-term memory if it is rehearsed.
• weakness = Dual task experiments suggest that people perform better when doing two tasks of a different nature e.g., verbal, and visual and perform poorly on two tasks of the same nature e.g., visual, and visual. This is a weakness as it shows that there may be more than one way information is processed the dual capacity cannot be explained by MSM as it suggests that the limited capacity of STM is not dependent on the type of information as it is only encoded acoustically.
• due to the simplistic description of how information is only passed into your LTM through rehearsal, the theory cannot explain why some information moves into your LTM without rehearsal. e.g., listening to music and revising, although you may not be paying attention or rehearsing the lyrics of the song, you may remember the lyrics and not the content you revise whilst doing the exam. this can be explained by the WMM as the lyrics and revision both use the phonological loop and auditory control, as the subsystem is being over worked with two verbal tasks, some information is lost by forgetting.