Multi-Store Model

Coding

How information is stored.

Capacity

Amount of information that can be stored

Duration

Length of time information can be stored.

Sensory Register

Processes environment stimuli, information is held in an unprocessed form for all senses in separate stores.

Not all information will be passes on or processed.

Sperling

\[Sensory Register\] Participants saw 12 letters on a 3x4 grid for 50 milliseconds and were asked to recall as many letters as possible. The average recall was 4-5 but they were aware of more letters that they couldn’t recall.

Partial recall resulted in 75% recall for the selected row suggesting low capacity and duration.

Conrad

\[Short term memory\] This experiment explored encoding by showing participants a string of letters for a very short period of time and then requiring recall immediately.

It was found that confusion came from how they sounded rather than how the looked suggesting acoustic coding.

Miller

\[Short term memory\] This experiment explored capacity by showing participants a string of numbers adding an additional one each round and then being asked to recall them in exact order. Participants could recall 5-9 numbers with a mean number of 7.

Peterson and Peterson

\[Short term memory\] This experiment explored duration by giving participants a three consonant word which they couldn’t rehearse due to an interference task, the longer this was the worse the recall.

After 3 seconds of counting down backwards recall was 80% but after 18 seconds it was less than 10%.

It was concluded that STM isn’t much more than 18 seconds without rehearsal.

Baddeley

\[Long term memory\] This experiment explored encoding, participants were put into 4 conditions: Acoustically similar, Acoustically dissimilar, Semantically similar and Semantically dissimilar.

STM recall errors were largely from the Acoustically dissimilar list.

LTM recall errors were largely from the semantically similar list, therefore LTM is semantic.

Bahrick

\[Long term memory\] This experiment explored duration using a collection of graduation photographs from over 50 years and 400 ex-students ages 17-74.

The conditions were matching photos with names from a list (recognition) or naming students in photographs (recall)

Recognition: 90% at 14yrs, 75% at 34yrs, 60% at 47yrs.

Recall: 60% after 7yrs and 20% after 47yrs.

Serial position curve

\[Glanzer and Cunitz\] When participants were asked to recall 20 common words, the first words said were stored in the LTM so effectively recalled, and the most recently were stored in the STM so effectively recalled.

Intermediate words were difficult to remember.