Lesson 3 - ulti Store Model Of Memory Flashcards
Who developed the multi store model?
It was developed by Atkinson and Shiffrin. It attempts to explain how info flows from one memory store to another. There are 3 permanent structures in the memory system: The sensory register, the short term memory and the long term memory. Each differ in capacity, coding and duration and how info is lost from them
What is sensory register?
Stimuli from the environment that is received through all senses enters the sr. This is a short duration store that retains unprocessed impressions of information received through the senses. Each sense has a different store.
The capacity is unlimited but the duration is 250ms
Only a small fraction of the info received by the SR is attended to and selected for further processing in STM. If not attended to the info is lost to decay
What is STM?
STM is a temporary store for information received by the SR, before it gets transferred to the LTM. Information from the SR gets acoustically coded into the STM, so similar sounding material can be confused. In the STM, Info can still be forgotten or retrieved before it gets transferred to the LTM.
Capacity if 7(+/-) 2 pieces of info. So info can be displaced with newer incoming info. STM also has a short duration of 18-30s. So without rehearsal, info will decay quickly
How is info kept in the STMe
It can be kept by using maintenance rehearsal (repeated verbalisation or thinking about the info). If there is also sufficient rehearsal/ elaborative rehearsal (info organised in a meaningful way) then info can be transferred to LTM, for more permanent storage.
Long term memory
If info is sufficiently Rehearsed and repeated then it gets semantically coded into LTM, which is a permanent holding store for potentially unlimited amounts of info for a lifetime
Capacity is infinite and duration could be a lifetime - no way of measuring it.
When info from LTM is needed, it gets retrived by STM, then recalled. Sometimes we can’t access info from LTM due to retrieval failure and so we may need retrieval cues to help access it
