Multistore Model Of Memory Flashcards
Psychologists who came up with MSM
Atkinson and Shriffrin
What is the MSM
How information flows through a series of storage systems
Explain the MSM
- info taken in by our 5 senses and automatically stored in a unprocessed form in our sensory register
- paying attention to the info means it goes into our short term memory
- maintenance rehearsal can be used to memorise info for a short period of time but it does not go into LTM
- elaborate rehearsal of info means info goes into our LTM
- retrieval info from LTM goes into our STM
Describe Sensory register
- Info taken in by our 5 sense is automatically stored in an unprocessed form in SR
- separate store for each of the 5 senses
Coding in SR
- Model specific
- Mainly ionic and echoic
Capacity in SR
High capacity
Temporary
Duration in SR
Less than 30 seconds
Research supporting capacity in SR
Sperling
- flashed a 3 x 4 grid of letters onto a screen fr 1/20 of a second
- immediately sounded 1 of 3 different tones indicating which of the rows of letters the ppts was to recall
- recall was consistently accurate suggesting capacity is large
Short term memory
- Information received from SR
- Active memory system
- Contains info being thought about
Coding in STM
- mainly acoustic
Research in coding STM
Baddeley
- wanted to see if coding in STM was acoustic or semantic
- ppts where divide into 4 groups each group heard a different list of 5 words
- list A acoustically similar
list B acoustically dissimilar
list C semantically similar
list D semantically dissimilar
- then asked to recall words in thee correct order
- list A 10% list BCD 60% to 80%
- proves STM primarily acoustic as list A recalled least efficiently as there’s acoustic confusion
Evaluation of baddeley coding in STM
- Small difference in recall between semantically similar(64%) and semantically dissimilar lists (71%)suggest their is also semantic coding in STM
- lacks ecological validity: lab study not repressive of real life
Capacity of STM
- Small 5 or 9 items can be held at once
- can be increased via chunking
Research for capacity STM
Jacobs
- serial digit span method
- ppts read a list of 1 syllable letters or numbers to listen to and immediately recall them in the correct order
- stared with a short list and the list steadily increased
- until it became impossible to recall in serial order
- when ppts fail 50% of tasks they have reached capacity
- cavity of number 9 capacity of letter 7
- demonstrate STM limited capacity
Who revised jacobs research into capacity of STM
Miller
- found most people hae a recall of 7+-2 = magic number 7
- recognised chunking digits
What is chunking
Grouping digits into meaningful chunks
Increased number of digits recalled
Increasing the capacity of STM
Others factors that affect capacity of STM
Age, practise, poor/advanced comprehension (can vary between 5 to 20 items) and attention
Duration of STM
- Max 30 seconds
- can be extended via rehearsal
Research into duration of STM
Peterson and Peterson
-ppts where shown trigrams
- then asked to count back in 3s from a large 3 digit number for different amounts of time before recalling trigrams
- counting backwards was a distractor task and prevents rehearsal of trigrams
- 3 secs of counting 90% accuracy
- 18 secs of counting 5% accuracy
Shows duration of STM is between 20-30 secs
Evaluation of STM
- lack mundane realism: little relevance to STM tasks in real life
- other research suggests duration of STM affected by the amount of time taken to process if ppt weren’t expecting to recall info STM was only 2-4 seconds
Long term memory
- Store info for a lifetime
- LTM can change and merge other others affecting their accuracy
Coding for LTM
Coding for LTM is semantic
Research for coding in LTM
Baddeley
- same procedure as STM
- however it differs with a 20 minute interval time before they were asked to recall words
- found list C semantically similar = 55% accuracy list ABD = 70% and 85% accuracy
Evaluation of coding in LTM
Research support:frost
- gave ppts 16 drawings in 4 categories different in visual orientation
- order of recall of items shows visual coding in LTM