Models of Memory
Outline and Evaluate Models of Memory. (12 Marks)
There are roughly four models of memory in total, but two stand out and are used in this particular specification.
Atkinson and Schifrin’s (1968) “Multi-Store Model” is one of them.
Their model suggests that the memory consists of three stores, a sensory store, a short-term store and a long-term store; all three have a specific and relatively inflexible function. It stressed that information for our environment such as the visual or auditory and haptic (by touch) initially goes into the sensory memory or empirical register. However, it has very limited capacity, and its duration is very brief, so if we do not notice this much we would forget it, but if we pay attention to it or think about it, the information would be encoded into a preferred acoustic manner and be passed into the short-term memory, it could also be passed in visual, if we refer to Conrad. Yet Schulman, a famous psychologist argued that it could be encoded as visual and according to semantics. Heyer and Barrett stated that the visual information would be hard to acoustically coded and suggested that it would only be stored briefly in the short-term memory in this manner. Several tests were made on this idea, such as Conrad’s experiment with letters, which showed signs of acoustic confusion; another was Schulman’s test of words, which stressed that semantic and acoustic encoding occurs in the Short-term memory. The short-term memory has finite (limited) capacity, but we could increase it to some extent. This could be explained by Miller’s theory consisting of 7 discrete chunks in the short-term memory such as 1+2+3+4+5+6+7, and stated that we could increase our capacity by combining chunks. His famous phrase “The magical number seven plus or minus two”. Yet they are chunked to the meaning they have in the short term memory. This despite its explanation on the duration lacks ecological validity as it was carried out in a lab and not in a real
There are roughly four models of memory in total, but two stand out and are used in this particular specification.
Atkinson and Schifrin’s (1968) “Multi-Store Model” is one of them.
Their model suggests that the memory consists of three stores, a sensory store, a short-term store and a long-term store; all three have a specific and relatively inflexible function. It stressed that information for our environment such as the visual or auditory and haptic (by touch) initially goes into the sensory memory or empirical register. However, it has very limited capacity, and its duration is very brief, so if we do not notice this much we would forget it, but if we pay attention to it or think about it, the information would be encoded into a preferred acoustic manner and be passed into the short-term memory, it could also be passed in visual, if we refer to Conrad. Yet Schulman, a famous psychologist argued that it could be encoded as visual and according to semantics. Heyer and Barrett stated that the visual information would be hard to acoustically coded and suggested that it would only be stored briefly in the short-term memory in this manner. Several tests were made on this idea, such as Conrad’s experiment with letters, which showed signs of acoustic confusion; another was Schulman’s test of words, which stressed that semantic and acoustic encoding occurs in the Short-term memory. The short-term memory has finite (limited) capacity, but we could increase it to some extent. This could be explained by Miller’s theory consisting of 7 discrete chunks in the short-term memory such as 1+2+3+4+5+6+7, and stated that we could increase our capacity by combining chunks. His famous phrase “The magical number seven plus or minus two”. Yet they are chunked to the meaning they have in the short term memory. This despite its explanation on the duration lacks ecological validity as it was carried out in a lab and not in a real