Describe and Evaluate Experimental Research into STM.

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Describe and Evaluate Experimental Research into STM

Short-term memory information is selected for further processing passes from the SIS into the STM. It is thought that STM holds information in the form of images, sounds or meanings. Information in STM is kept ‘alive’ by rehearsing (repeating) it.

Two key pieces of evidence about life span and capacity of STM: Peterson and Peterson (1959) gave participants a consonant trigram to remember (e.g. KDL) and then a large number. To prevent rehearsal they counted backwards in threes from the number and then recalled the trigram. Participants were unable to recall the trigram at all after18-30 seconds indicating that this is the life span of items in STM.

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        Miller (1956) asked participants to listen to strings of numbers or consonants of varying length and recall them in order. The average recall was 7+- 2 items (miller’s magical seven). Our STM is, therefore capable of holding between 5 and 9 items or chunks.

Baddeley and Hitch (1974) elaborated on the idea of STM. They proposed that it was not just for brief storage of information. They thought it was also actively processed the information and decided what to do with it-hence the term ‘working memory’. The working memory consists of three parts as shown in the diagram below.

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