The multi-store model of memory Flashcards
Who proposed the multi-store model?
Atkinson and Shiffrin
What are the three main stores?
Sensory register, short term memory store and long term memory store.
What does the sensory register do?
A stimulus from the environment passes through the sensory register. The main stores are iconic memory, where visual information is coded visually, and echoic memory where auditory information is coded acoustically. Material in the sensory registers last a brief time and very little of what goes into the sensory register passes further into the system, unless you pay close attention.
What happens in the STM store?
A small amount of information is kept for a short time in STM unless it is rehearsed long enough to be passed into LTM.
What happens in the LTM store?
It is the potentially permanent memory for information. Although it is stored in LTM, when we want to recall it, it must be transferred back to STM by a process called retrieval. According to MSM no memory can be directly recalled from LTM.
What are the strengths of the MSM model?
There is supporting evidence from Baddeley for the separate LTM and STM stores and their capacity and duration.
What are the weakness of the MSM model?
It doesn’t explain the findings of more than one type of LTM that HM and Clive Wearing displayed.
It ignores the evidence for multiple STM stores found in KF’s case study when he remembered better reading words to himself than when others read to him.
Craik and Watkins found that the type of rehearsal impacts the recall, which isn’t accounted for in the MSM.
Artificial materials were used to provide evidence which have no meaning and so make it hard to generalise to real life.
