Give a Brief Account of Different Characteristics of Short-Term Memory, Long-Term Memory and Evaluat

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Give a Brief Account of Different Characteristics of Short-Term Memory, Long-Term Memory and Evaluate Research That Demonstrates These Differences.

A memory in short-term memory (STM) does not last long, the duration is limited. It cannot hold a lot of information. The information it deals with is the immediate past and can only be held for a short period of time without rehearsal. The information tends do be encoded acoustically most of the time.

 Long-term memory (LTM) deals with information from the distant past. It can hold information, theoretically, from two minutes to last the whole of the person’s life. The capacity of LTM is unlimited; therefore it is able to hold an unlimited amount of information. The information tends to be encoded semantically most of the time.

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Baddeley’s study on encoding in STM and LTM (1966) proved that the STM tends to be encoded acoustically and LTM tends to be encoded semantically. In the STM study, the list of acoustically similar words was recalled worst, therefore showing that STM would encode information on an acoustic basis. The criticism in this was that STM uses other ways to encode information. Visual images, such as faces would be hard to encode in STM by means of sound.

In the LTM study, the list that was worse recalled was the semantically similar words. This showed that LTM tends ...

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