Short Term Memory - created from Mind Map

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Capacity

7+/- 2 items of information

Miller 1956 -found out that most people could only repeat back between five and nine items

Chunking can increase the capacity of short term memory. For example: GCSE

Duration

Peterson and Peterson 1959

Aim: Establish the duration of short term memory when Rehearsal is prevented

Participants heard a Trigram which was held up to 30 seconds. They were asked to recall it immediately or recall it after a set of retention interval:3,6,9,12,15 or 18 seconds. During the period before recall, they were asked to count backwards in 3's from a specified number to prevent Maintenance Rehearsal

Conclusion: Without Rehearsal, the duration of STM is only a few seconds

Encoding

Encoding :The way the information is put into each store : Acoustic form

Conard 1964

Aim: To establish the form in which information is encode into STM

Participants were shown a sequence of six letters.They were asked to write them down as the appeared,but the presentation ran to fast for them to keep. Therefore, keeping the information in STM. Participants often made acoustic errors, where the letters that they had seen were replaced by those that sound simular. Even when the information is presented visual,encoding was acoustically

Short Term Memory