multi-store model of memory

who proposed the multi-store model of memory?

Atkinson and Shiffrin 1968

what does the multi-store model consist of?

sensory register, short term memory, long term memory

what is a sensory experience?

information that comes through our senses, it enters the sensory register where it is held for a brief moment before it decays

where is information from the sensory register that is paid attention to transferred to?

short term memory

how long can information be held for in short term memory?

30 seconds

how can information in short term memory be maintained?

through rehearsal

where can information from short term memory be transferred to?

long term permanent storage

how has the visual sensory register been researched by Sperling 1960-63?

a visual array of letters was presented to participants via a tachistoscope for a brief moment before a direction was given to recall the whole or a specific row of the array

what is a tachistoscope?

a device used to present information in a controlled way

how many items can the sensory register hold?

3-4 for a few hundred milliseconds

how has the duration of short term memory been researched by Peterson and Peterson 1959?

participants had to recall a single trigram of 3 consonants for intervals of 3,6,9 etc. seconds before given the interference task of counting back from a given number in 3's - performance dropped after 15-18 seconds

what is capacity?

the amount of information that can be stored by the memory system

who investigated the capacity of short term memory?

Miller 1956 who proposed short term memory as a series of 5-9 items

how did Glanzer and Cunitz 1966 find support for the multi-store model?

they found the first and last words in a word list were recalled well but the middle words were not

what is the primacy effect?

information learned first is well remembered because it has gone into long term memory through the rehearsal loop

what is the recency effect?

information learned at the end is well remembered because it is still in the rehearsal loop and available for immediate recall

what is displacement?

information in the middle is not well recalled because it did not go from the rehearsal loop into LTM and was displaced by new material coming into the loop

what is encoding?

transforming sensory experience into a form that can be held and used by the memory system

what did Atkinson and Shiffrin believe about memory trace in short term memory?

it was held in an auditory or verbal form because of the phonological similarity effect

what is the phonological similarity effect?

letters or words of a similar sound are more difficult to recall than dissimilar sounding ones

what does the similarity of sounds lead to in short term memory?

confusion which suggests encoding in this store is primarily acoustic

what is retrieval from short term memory based on?

rapid scanning of stored information

why is rehearsal important in maintaining information in short term memory?

to increase the strength of memory trace

how is long term memory used in the transferral of information from the sensory register to short term memory?

to assign a verbal label to the information, as images cannot be stored as an auditory-verbal short term memory until we have identified what the object represents

how can a stronger memory trace be achieved when transferring information from short term to long term memory?

using mental operation such as mnemonics to increase the strength of transfer

what is meant by mnemonics?

patterns, associations or techniques like rhymes to make information easier to retain and recall

what do Atkinson and Shiffrin believe about retrieval from long term memory?

long term memories exist for all sensory modalities, and any memories retained in LTM have multiple copies rather than a single memory trace

how does Brown and Mcneill's 1968 tip of the tongue phenomenon support Atkinson and Shiffrin's ideas about retrieval from STM?

by showing people were able to accurately predict that they could recognise a correct answer even if they could not recall the answer at that moment in time

what can encoding of information in long term memory depend on?

the rehearsal process or form of association between new and pre-existing knowledge

how can the search for information stored in long term memory be made easier?

if information is linked to pre-existing knowledge, as a random search of a large store is exhaustive

what type of encoding is used in long term memory?

semantic

what is the duration and capacity of long term memory?

potentially infinite

how does research by Bahrick 1975 support the duration of long term memory?

he found identification of names and faces in participants high school yearbook was 70-80% accurate 48 years after leaving school

how does research by Brady 2008 support the capacity of long term memory?

participants were shown 2500 objects over 5.5 hours, when they were later shown the original object paired with a very different object, identification was 92% compared to 88% if the different object was of similar identification