Short And Long Term Memory

Question 1

What is the capacity for STM? (2 things)

Answer 1

Joseph Jacobs said 9.3 items for digits, 7.3 items for letters.

George Miller said 7+/-2 : we can remember 7 items, sometimes more sometimes less. Remember items in chunks

Question 2

Evaluation point about capacity of STM? (Cowan)

Answer 2

Cowan reviewed a number of studies on capacity of STM and found that capacity is limited to 4 chunks

Question 3

Evaluation point about remembering items in chunks?

Answer 3

Simon found that memory span is shorter for larger chunks

Question 4

Evaluation point about capacity of STM (individual differences)

Answer 4

Capacity of STM is not the same for everybody. Jacobs found that recall increases with age. 8y/o can remember an average of 6.6 digits, whereas 19 y/o can remember an average of 8.6 digits.

Question 5

What is the duration of STM?

Answer 5

About 18 seconds (based on experiment by Peterson and Peterson)

Question 6

What is an evaluation point about duration of STM?

Answer 6

Peterson and Peterson’s experiment (remembering consonant syllables) does not reflect every day memory activity- lack of mundane realism.
However, you can argue that we do remember meaningless lists such as phone numbers: so it does have some relevance

Question 7

How is STM encoded?

Answer 7

Acoustically

Question 8

What is the capacity of LTM

Answer 8

Unlimited

Question 9

What is the duration of LTM

Answer 9

2mins-100 years.
Experiment of photo recall by Harry Bahrick. People asked to identify old class mates in photos. 15years after grad: 90% accurate
48years after grad: 70% accurate