Memory: The multi store model (Atkinson and Shiffrin 1968)
This was the first complex model to explain human memory, it divided memory into three unitary
stores of sensory, short term, and long-term memory, and believed memory passes through these
stores in linear fashion.
Maintenance
rehearsal
Retrieval
Sensory Short term Long term
memory (STM) memory (LTM)
register
Attention
Prolonged rehearsal
Information lost: Displacement or decay
Information lost: Decay Information lost: Decay or interference
Sensory store: Information from the environment passes to here.
Coding: via our senses (smell, sight)
Capacity: Very large
Duration: less than ½ second
The short-term store: If attention is paid, the information passes to here.
Coding: acoustically (by sound)
Capacity: 7 +/- 2 chunks of information (Millers magic number)
Duration: 18-30 seconds (unless maintenance rehearsal is used to keep it in STM)
The Long-term store:
Coding: Semantically (information coded into meaning or fact)
Capacity: potentially unlimited
Duration: potentially unlimited
Maintenance rehearsal: involves repeating information without thinking about its meaning or connecting it to other
information, the information is not usually transferred to long term memory . An example of maintenance rehearsal would be
remembering a phone number only long enough to make the phone call.
Evaluation +/-
Conflicting research: Shallice and Warrington studied patient KF (amnesia) who could recall digits
that he had read by himself, but not those that were read out to him, suggesting that there are at
least two components to short term memory, that is better explained through the working model of
memory in the form of a ‘phonological store’. Therefore, STM memory is much more complex than
the MSM proposes. However, case study on HM supports the idea that stm and ltm are separate
stores, following surgery to the hippocampus hiss stm was good but his ltm was poor, supporting
that memory is stored in separate stores.
This was the first complex model to explain human memory, it divided memory into three unitary
stores of sensory, short term, and long-term memory, and believed memory passes through these
stores in linear fashion.
Maintenance
rehearsal
Retrieval
Sensory Short term Long term
memory (STM) memory (LTM)
register
Attention
Prolonged rehearsal
Information lost: Displacement or decay
Information lost: Decay Information lost: Decay or interference
Sensory store: Information from the environment passes to here.
Coding: via our senses (smell, sight)
Capacity: Very large
Duration: less than ½ second
The short-term store: If attention is paid, the information passes to here.
Coding: acoustically (by sound)
Capacity: 7 +/- 2 chunks of information (Millers magic number)
Duration: 18-30 seconds (unless maintenance rehearsal is used to keep it in STM)
The Long-term store:
Coding: Semantically (information coded into meaning or fact)
Capacity: potentially unlimited
Duration: potentially unlimited
Maintenance rehearsal: involves repeating information without thinking about its meaning or connecting it to other
information, the information is not usually transferred to long term memory . An example of maintenance rehearsal would be
remembering a phone number only long enough to make the phone call.
Evaluation +/-
Conflicting research: Shallice and Warrington studied patient KF (amnesia) who could recall digits
that he had read by himself, but not those that were read out to him, suggesting that there are at
least two components to short term memory, that is better explained through the working model of
memory in the form of a ‘phonological store’. Therefore, STM memory is much more complex than
the MSM proposes. However, case study on HM supports the idea that stm and ltm are separate
stores, following surgery to the hippocampus hiss stm was good but his ltm was poor, supporting
that memory is stored in separate stores.
