Multi-store Model - Atkinson & Shiffrin (1968/1972)

Sensory Memory: Information encoded in sensory format. Capacity of 4 letters (Sperling 1960), or 10 letters (using partial recall). Duration of 2 seconds or less. Forgotten through decay.

Decay

Attention

Short-Term Memory: Mainly encoded acoustically. Capacity of 7±2 chunks of data (Miller 1956). Duration is potentially infinite as long as rehearsal is uninterrupted; otherwise a few seconds.

Reheasal

Long-Term Memory: Encoded semantically. Capacity is unlimited. Duration is potentially unlimited however decline after 48 years.

Displacement

Decay

Retrieval

Interference

Decay

Retrieval Failure