Area 1 Multi store model (AO1) + AO3 of rehearsal

Who was it developed by?

Atkinson and Shiffrin

What are the 3 unitary permanent stores in memory that make up the model?

sensory register (SR), short term memory (STM) and long term memory (LTM)

Sensory register: how does information enter sensory register? Duration? Coded?

Information through the senses enters the sensory register and is coded in its original form for only a short duration; information is lost rapidly from sensory memory after only half a second.

STM: Duration? Capacity? Encoded?

limited duration, 18 secs, 5-9 items, encoded acoustically

LTM: Duration? Capacity? Encoded?

unlimited capacity, lifetime duration, encoded semantically

What takes information from sensory memory to short term memory?

Attention. Any information which is not attended to will decay and be lost.

What is maintenance rehearsal?

form of acoustic repetition holds information in STM and moves it to LTM, any new information or distractions preventing rehearsal in the STM will push the information out and it will be lost.

Coding def

Coding refers to the form in which a

memory is stored in a particular store

e.g. acoustically or semantically.

Capacity def

Capacity refers to the amount of information that can be held at any one time in memory.

Duration

Refers to the amount of time that a memory can be stored.

Research for rehearsal

Murdock

• when participants were presented with a list of 20 words and asked to immediately recall them, they remember the first few and last few words, more likely to forget middle of the list.

• This is called the serial position effect = memory was affected by the order position of the word.

How does research for rehearsal support existence of seperate LTM and STM stores

This supports the existence of separate LTM and STM stores because they observed this primacy and recency effect. Words early on in the list were put into long term memory (primacy effect) because the person has time to rehearse the word, and words from the end went into short term memory (recency effect).

Counter arguments for rehearsal as way of moving STM→ LTM

• Rehearsal is too simple explanation to account for the transfer of information from STM to LTM e.g. model ignores factors such as motivation and strategy (e.g. mnemonics)

• Also, rehearsal is not essential to transfer information into LTM. e.g. we are often able to recall information which we did not rehearse (e.g. celebrity gossip) but unable to recall information which we have rehearsed (e.g. revision notes).

Clive Wearing

• had amnesia because virus attacks brain + damaged hippocampus (transfer STM→ LTM)

• unable to transfer new information into his long term memory but his short term memory is intact. For example he will forget a question he has been asked or a person he has just seen as little as 7-30 seconds later.

• This supports the MSM as it show that STM and LTM are separate stores.

• However Clive has lost his long term memory for events (fact and event memory is known as declarative memory) but his long memory for how to do things such as play the piano (memory for skills and habits is called non-declarative memory) remains unaffected.

• This actually criticises the MSM as it suggests there is not just one type of LTM but several.