The multi-store model Flashcards
What are the three stores in the multi-store model?
Sensory register, short-term memory (STM) and long-term memory (LTM)
What is attention?
The information from the environment that we notice and therefore gets passed from our sensory register to the STM.
What is maintenance rehearsal?
Occurs when we repeat materials to ourselves over and over in order to keep it in our STMs
What is prolonged rehearsal?
When we rehearse information for long enough that it passes into our LTM.
What is retrieval?
The process by which we transfer material back into our STM from our LTM so that we can recall it.
What is research evidence for the multi-store model?
Case study of HM (Scoville and Milner, 1957)
What is the case study for the multi-store memory model?
Case study of HM- Scoville and Milne 1957
What is the case study of HM?
Case study of HM (Scoville and Milner, 1957)
HM was a patient who suffered from epilepsy. He underwent brain surgery to relieve it, however the procedure used was in its infancy and not fully understood. Crucially a part of his brain known as the hippocampus was removed from both sides of his brain. We now know this to be central to memory function. When his memory was assessed he could remember everything from before the surgery, but could not form new long-term memories. He would read the same magazine repeatedly without remembering it and he couldn’t recall what he had eaten earlier the same day.
However, despite all this, he performed well on tests of immediate memory span, a measure of STM.
What are the two strengths for the Multi-store model?
Scientific research support- There is considerable research evidence for the existence of separate memory stores. Most of these are controlled lab studies and reveal the differences in the coding, capacity and duration of the separate stores.
E.G. Baddeley- we tend to mix up words that sound similar when we are using our STMs. But we mix up words that have similar meanings when we use our LTMs. This study shows that coding in STM is acoustic and in LTM it is semantic. This supports the MSM’s view that these two memory stores are separate and independent.
COUNTER-ARGUMENT: Artificial materials: In everyday life we form memories related to all sorts of useful things- people’s faces, their names, facts, places etc. However, a lot of the research studies that provide support for the MSM used none of these materials and made use of digits, letters, consonant syllables that have no meaning (ZLG).
Model supported by amnesia case studies- Psychologists have also shown that different areas of the brain are involved in STM and LTM from their study of individuals with brain damage, for example the case study of HM (see last lesson).
What are the two limitations of the multi-store model?
Idea of unitary stores is too simple- The MSM suggests that STM and LTM are single ‘unitary’ stores- research does not support this.
It has been found that STM isn’t just different in terms of capacity and duration, but in the kind of memory stored there.
E.G., Shallice and Warrington (1970) studied a patient with amnesia (patient KF). KF’s STM for digits was very poor when they had them read out loud to him. But recall was much better when he was able to read the digits to himself. This shows there must be one short-term store to process visual information and another one to process auditory information.
The working memory model (which we will be looking at next week) includes these separate stores.
LTM memory involves more than prolonged rehearsal- According to the MSM what matters in rehearsal is the amount of it that you do. The more you rehearse something the more likely you are to transfer it to LTM and remember it for a long time.
Craik and Tulving (1975) - what really matters about rehearsal is the type of processing you do when rehearsing it. Things that are processed more deeply are more memorable. They gave participants a list of nouns (e.g ‘shark’) and asked a question that involved shallow or deep processing- asked whether a word was printed in capital letters (shallow processing) or asked whether the word fitted in a sentence (deep processing). The participants remembered more words in the task involving deep processing rather than shallow processing. This deep processing is known as elaborative rehearsal- when you link the information to your existing knowledge, or you think about what it means.
It is this type of rehearsal that is needed for Long-term storage and the MSM does not take this into account.
