Memory

Memory

1. STM

   • Capacity- 7+/-2 items
     • Miller (1956) was the first to identify the limit of the STM with the claming of 7+/- 2 items
     • Miller found out that people can cope reasonably well with counting 7 dots flashed onto a screen but not many more than this
     • Also found out that people can recall 5 words as well as they can recall 5 letters- we chunk things to remember.
     • We can remember more small chunks for example in 1 syllable words rather than larger chunks. Simon, 1974
     • Cowan, 2001 the STM is generally limited to 4 chunks
   • Encoding- Acoustic
     • Alan Baddeley, 1966, demonstrated the different ways that STM and LTM are encoded by giving participants various word lists to memorise
     • one list the words all sounded the same accoustically simular, in another list the same thing sementicallysimilar
       • List A- accoustically simular- cat, cab, can, cad, mad, max, mat, man, map
         • List B- Acoustically Dissimilar- pit, few, cow, pen, sup, bar, day, hot, rig, bun
         • List C- Semantically similar- great, large, big, huge, broad, long, tall, fat,wide, high
         • List D- Semantically Dissimilar- good,huge, hot, safe, thin, deep, strong, foul, old, late
     • When participants were asked to recall the words they were shown all the words and had to decide on the correct order
     • if they were asked to do this immediately (STM recall) they didn't do well with acoustically similar words,
       • which suggest that words are stored in acoustic form in STM

2. LTM

   • Capacity- unlimited
     • Encoding- Semantic
       • Duration- A Lifetime