MSM

What does long term memory do?

• Unlimited capacity

• Potentially permanent duration

• Coded semantically

What does STM do?

• Acoustic (verbal)

• Capacity is 7+/-2 (miller)

• Info can be lost in 18-30 secs (Peterson and Peterson

What does sensory memory do?

• Info from the environment

• Will only stay there for ½ a sec

• Fleeting impression

• Echoic (acoustic) and iconic (visual)

• Sensory memory can pass on info to the STM if we pay attention to it

Structure of the MSM

What did sperling research?

Pps saw a grid of digits and letters fro 50 milliseconds then had to write down either all 12 items from a grid or just one row after hearing a tone

Recall was worse for the whole grid (42%) compared to one row (75%)

This suggests that info decays so quickly in the sensory store we can’t write it down quick enough

One strength of the MSM

P. Psychological evidence does support its main claims

E. Modern brain scans enable us to see which region of the brain in active when a person is doing a memory tasks

E. In STM the prefrontal cortex has been shown whereas it is in the hippocampus with LTM

L. This suggests STM and LTM are processed/located in different parts of the brain as the MSM predicts

One limitations of the MSM?

P. It is oversimplified

E.the MSM assumes there is a single STM and a single LTM evidence shows there are several (eg: procedural, episodic)

E. KF was an amnesiac his STM for digits was very poor when they were read out to him but if he read them himself it was better, suggesting there is more than one STM

L. This evidence suggests that the model is not comprehensive enough