Memory

• The multistore model of memory was created by Atkinson and Shiffrin and it involves 3 parts; sensory memory, short-term memory and long-term memory
• Sensory memory is the first stage of the MSM and is constantly receiving information though most is ignored
• Capacity of sensory memory is very large, duration of sensory memory is 0.25 secs- 2 secs and encoding of the sensory memory is the 5 senses (sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste)
• Walsh & Thompson (1978) flashed the letter 'O' twice with a brief interval; they found that the sensory store has a duration of 500 milliseconds
• Short term memory (STM) is for events in the present or immediate past and decays very quickly
• Short term memory has a capacity of 7 +/- 2 , it has a duration of 18-30 secs and its encoding is acoustic
• Peterson & Peterson (1959) read participants nonsense trigrams then asked them to count backwards in 3s from a large number; they found after a 3 sec delay, 90% recalled compared to 2% after 18 seconds
• Jacobs (1887) presented participants with a long list of numbers or letters which they had to immediately recall in the right order; found that the capacity for numbers was 9.3 and the capacity for letters was 7.3
• Long-term memory (LTM) has an unlimited capacity, a duration of potentially forever and its encoding is semantic
• Bahrick et al (1975) asked 392 ex-high-school students between 17 and 74 to identify their former classmates by free recall and photo recognition from a set of 50 photos; found participants were 90% accurate after 14 years and 60% accurate after 47 years
• Wagenaar (1986) created a diary of 2400 events over 6 years and tested recalling events rather than dates; found he had excellent recall
• Clive Wearing had a stroke in the link between his STM & LTM; his LTM was unaffected but he was unable to make new memories