Multi-store model

Multi-store model

1. Atkinson and Shiffin

2. Sensory Memory

   • The sensory stores (eyes, nose, mouth etc) are constantly recieving information, if a person does not pay attention to pieces of information that enter the sensory stores then that information is only retained for a brief moment and is then forgotten about, if that person does pay attention, however, then information is moved into the STM.
     • Sperling (1960) gave participnts a grid of letters and numbers, participants were then asked to recall all 12 items or only those items that corresponded to a certain tone. Recall was poorer when all 12 items were recalled (42%)while 75% recalled items in the row.This shows that information decays rapidly in the sensory store.

3. The Short Term Memory (STM)

   • The STM, acts almost like post-it notes, only holding information for a limited capacity (as shown by Peterson and Peterson with their nonsense trigram experiment). This means that information will dissapear after around 20 seconds. Rehearsal is vital in the STM as this is the reason that we can remember Information, e.g telephone number, rehearsal also transfres information from the STM and into the LTM
   • KF= brain damage, difficulty dealing with verbal info.suggests stm is non-unitary

4. Long term Memory (LTM)

   • Atkinson and shiffrin calimed that maintenance rehearsal moves information from the STM and into the LTM, this means that information must be rehearsed repeatedly so that the information lasts longer. The LTM has a potentially unlimited capacity and duration allowing information to last for up to a lifetime. In addition to this in formation can be retrieved from the LTM and back into the STM for use.

5. Serial Position effect:Glanzer and Cunitz gave participants 20 words , one at a time. this showed the primary and recency effect when recalled, first words were reheased more, lasst words were the last things to enter our stm

6. Brain scans: Beardsley= showed prefontal cortex was active during tasks using stm. Squire et al=showed hippocampus was active when doing tasks usin ltm.

7. Case Studies

   • Scoville and Milner= HM: brain damage due to removal of hippocampus causing severe epilepsy from both sides of head. HM's personality and intellect remained but was unable to form new long term memories.= suggests hippocampus acts as a gateway between new memories and old memories

8. Strong evidence= suggests basis of msm is fine.

9. provides an account of memory and its process

10. does not give much focus to the processes within memory

11. allows for tests to be carried out based on the msm

12. oversimplifies the processes and structure of memory

13. key features: linear, universal, rehearsal, passive

14. psychologists claim there are different types of memory and also different types of processing.

15. Logie pointed out that msm was not linear as the STM relied on the LTM, e.g when chunking lists of letters we know if they are meaningful, e.g BBC or ITV

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