Monday 22nd January 2024
Multi – Store Model of Memory (MSM)
Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968)
- 3 different types of memory:
o Model describes these as “memory stores”.
o Sensory Memory, Short Term Memory, & Long-Term Memory.
- Any stimulus you come across flows from one store to another in a fixed sequence.
- Each store retains a different amount of info in a different way and for a different
length of time.
PsychBoost video MSM
Sensory Register:
- Not under cognitive control like LTM or STM.
- Information coming from senses is detected and recorded automatically.
- Ask information found in LTM and STM stores were initially gathered by sensory
register.
- Information is passed on to STM by paying attention.
- Coding – Store depends on sense organ that the information comes from senses which
are modality specific.
- Capacity – Potentially Unlimited.
- Duration – ¼ of a second.
STM
- Receives information from the sensory register by paying attention. Passes
information to LTM through rehearsal. This is either maintenance rehearsal (repeating
info) or elaborate rehearsal (linking to info already in LTM). Information is passed
back from LTM with retrieval and information can be lost via displacement (new info)
or decay (lost over time).
- Coding – Acoustic - Information in STM is stored acoustically (in the form of
sound/spoken words)
Monday 22nd January 2024
Multi – Store Model of Memory (MSM)
- Capacity – Miller suggested this is small, approximately 7 items +/- 2 items (5-9) and
this can be improved by chinking making small sets/groups of items. This reduces
number of items overall.
- Duration – Short, 15 – 30 seconds. However, duration of information can be extended
by verbal rehearsal (rehearsal loop).
Long Term Memory
- Information which may be stored permanently and LTM may be unlimited in amount
of information it can contain. Information comes into LTM from STM via rehearsal
and to use information in LTM it needs to be passed back to STM via rehearsal.
- Coding – Information in LTM is stored semantically, however can sometimes be
acoustic.
- Duration and Capacity – Potentially unlimited.
Flashbulb memories – Brown and Kulik (1977)
Enduring and accurate memories of important and highly emotional events.
No processing needed to transfer to LTM.
Importance of emotion
Evaluation
Lacks external validity – Low ecological validity, results collected in lab environment may
not be generalisable to other more naturalistic situations like school and work. Also lack of
mundane realism, experimental tasks testing MSM are unlike how people use memory in real
life scenarios.
Artificial design of experimental studies may be the only way of clearly measuring memory
and testing limits of memory. This approach may ultimately uncover the underlining internal
mental structure of memory.
Models of memory cannot be directly observed so researchers must make inferences in the
structure of memory based on the behaviour observed during experimentation. These
inferences are effectively educated guesses and could be incorrect.
Large capacity and short duration of sensory register matches what would be expected from
evolutionary theory, that as much information as possible is gathered from how the
environment, but only the important information is processed.
