A Level Psychology: The Multi-Store Model of Memory:

A Level Psychology: The Multi-Store Model of Memory: Multi-store model (MSM) definition

A representation of how memory works in terms of three stores called sensory register, short-term memory (STM) and long-term memory (LTM). It also describes how information is transferred from one store to another, how it is remembered and how it is forgotten.

A Level Psychology: The Multi-Store Model of Memory: Sensory register defnition

The memory stores for each of our five senses, such as vision(iconic store) and hearing (echoic store).

Coding in the iconic sensory register is visual and in the echoic sensory register it is acoustic.

The capacity of sensory registers is huge (millions of receptors) and information lasts for a very short time (less than half a second).

A Level Psychology: The Multi-Store Model of Memory: Sensory register

A stimulus from the environment; for example, the sound of someone's name, will pass into the sensory registers along with lots of other sights, sounds, smells and so on.

So this part of memory is not one store but several, in fact one for each of our five senses.

The two main stores are called iconic memory (visual information is coded visually echoic memory.

Material in sensory registers lasts only very briefly- the duration is less than half a second.

The sensory registers have a high capacity, for example over one hundred million cells in one eye, each storing data.

Very little of what goes into the sensory register passes further into the memory system.

The key process is attention.

The Multi-Store Model of Memory: short-term memory (STM)

STM is what is known as a limited capacity store, because it can only contain a certain number of "things" before forgetting takes place.

The average capacity of STM is, on average, somewhere between 5 and 9 items although research suggests it might be more like 5 rather than 9.

Information in the STM is coded acoustically and lasts about 30 seconds unless rehearsed.

Maintenance rehearsal occurs when we repeat material to ourselves over and over again.

We can keep the information in our STM's as long as we rehearse it.

If we rehearse it long enough, it passes into long-term memory (LTM).

The Multi-Store Model of Memory: Long term memory is potentially the permanent memory stored for information that has been rehearsed for a prolonged time.

Psychologists believe that it's capacity is unlimited and can for many years.

The Multi-Store Model of Memory: For example, as we saw in the previous spread, Bahrick et al found that many of their participants were able to recognise the names and faces of their school classmates almost 50 years after graduating.

We also saw that LTM's tend to be coded semantically.

Although this material is stored in LTM, when we want to recall it, it has to be transferred back into STM by a process called retrieval.

According to the MSM, this is true of all our memories.

None of them are recalled directly from LTM.

The Multi-Store Model of Memory (Evaluation): A major strength of the MSM is that it is supported by research studies that show that STM and LTM are quantitatively different.

Baddeley found that we tend to mix up words that sound similar when using our STMs but we mix up words that have similar meanings when we are using our LTMs.

The strength of this study is that it clearly shows that coding in STM is acoustic and in LTM it is semantic.

So they are different, and this supports the MSM's view that these two memory stores are separate and independent.

The Multi-Store Model of Memory (Evaluation): The MSM states that STM is a unitary store, in other words there is only one type of short-term memory.

However, evidence from people suffering from amnesia shows this cannot be true.

The unitary STM is a limitation of the MSM because research shows that at the very least there must be one short-term store to process visual information and another one to process auditory information due to Shallice and Warrington study of amnesia patient KF.

The working memory model includes these separate stores.

The Multi-Store Model of Memory (Evaluation): According to the MSM, what matters in rehearsal is the amount of it that you do.

However, Craig and Watkins (1973) found this to be wrong.

What matters is the type of rehearsal.

They discovered that there are two types of rehearsal, Maintenance rehearsal is the type described in the MSM but Elaborative rehearsal is needed for long term storage.

This is a serious limitation of the MSM because it is another research finding that cannot be explained by the model.

The Multi-Store Model of Memory (Evaluation): In everyday life, we form memories related to all sorts of useful things - people's faces, their names, facts, places and so on.

A lot of research studies that provide support for the MSM used none of these materials.

Instead they used digits, letters, and sometimes words.

The Multi-Store Model of Memory (Evaluation): There is a lot of research evidence that LTM, like STM, is not an unitary memory store.

For example, we have one long term store for our memories of facts about the world, and we have a different one for our memories of facts about the world.

These different types of memory are explained on the next spread.