Multi-Store Model

Multi-Store Model

1. Atkinson and Shiffrin

   • Multi-store model contains the sensory register, the short term memory and the long term memory
   • The short term memory is split into two stores - the iconic store and the echoic store

2. Sensory Register

   • Limited duration - usually less than half a second
   • Large capacity
   • Echoic store - is auditory information which gets stored acoustically
   • Iconic store - is visual information which gets stored visually
   • Things in the sensory register very rarely pass through the rest of the system

3. Short Term Memory

   • Limited duration - 18-30 seconds
   • Small capacity - 7+/-2
   • Coding is acoustic
   • Maintenance rehearsal is needed to pass through to the ltm
     • Maintenance rehearsal is when you repeat something over and over again so it stays in your stm for as long as you need it, if it it repeated enough time it will pass through to the ltm

4. Long Term Memory

   • Unlimited capacity
   • Duration is forever
   • Coding is semantic
   • Information goes to the ltm when it is rehearsed enough to form a memory, when this memory is needed it must be consciously recalled so that it can pass along the rehearsal loop the stm
     • Retrieval is when you consciously think about something in order for it to be passed along the rehearsal loop from the ltm to the stm. Eg: a fact about the world when needed in a quiz

5. A03:

   • STRENGTH: Shallice and Warrington studied KF who was a motorcyclist who suffered from amnesia, they found that his stm was damaged but his ltm was intact proving the ideology that the stm and ltm are two separate stores
   • WEAKNESS: The materials used to figure out the structure of the multi-store model were artificial therefore this causes the results to have limited generalisability to real life situations due to the lack of mundane realism
   • WEAKNESS: The multi-store model is criticised for being too simplistic, Tulving said that there are 3 stores of long term memory alone and Atkinson and Shiffrin are trying to say that there are only 3 parts of the full memory