Describe and evaluate models of memory.

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Claire Harvey

               DISCRIBE AND EVALUATE MODELS OF MEMORY

What is memory? Memory is involved in all aspects of our lives, is it a cognitive thinking process or a way of retaining information or is it a number of connected stores or even actual information retained. According to Reber (1985), it is possibly all of theses. Memory has not been defined as a single process or fact and several theories exist about its nature, character and structure.

    We have vast amounts of information stored in our memory systems which we are able to access quickly and effortlessly, this implies that knowledge stored must be highly organised to allow us to retrieve the appropriate information for a given situation. This organising will be determined by the way that information is encoded into memory. The way the knowledge is organised will determine the type of process required to access that information in the future.

 

      Atkinson and Shiffrin (1969) suggested that memory comprised of three separate stores. The sensory memory store, the short-term memory and the long term-memory each store has a specific and relatively inflexible function. This was called the multi-store model.

 

  There are two main memory stores short term memory (STM) and long term memory (LTM),they are studies in terms of there ability to encode, which means make sense of information, also by there capacity, how much information is stored and by duration ,how long the information can be stored.

  How does the short-term memory store work? Conrad (1964) suggested that short-term memory code all information acoustically. Visual information is encoded to acoustic codes. In his experiment, He presented participants with list of consonants and they looked at them for three quarters of a second, then they had to recall what they had seen. Conrad found that errors of recall were linked to letters which had similar sounds, he referred to these errors as acoustic confusion, but this did suggest his theory that information is encoded according to sound.

   Schulman (1970) disagreed with Conrad; he thought that short term memory also encoded information but visually and according to semantics which is meaning. Schulman’s research suggests that Conrad was incorrect in saying all encoding were acoustic. Schulman, presented participants with visual list of ten words. They were then asked to recall them. Recall was tested using cue or probe words. The first probe word were homonyms, words which sound the same but have different meaning, like ball and bawl. The second one of three were synonyms, different words with similar meanings for example talk and speak, the last probe word used were identical to the ones in the original list. Similar numbers of errors of recall from the original list were made for homonym and synonym probes. This suggests that semantic encoding as well as acoustic encoding occurs in short term memory.

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       Both Conrad and Schulman research were laboratory experiments therefore they lack ecological validity due to controlled artificial environments. The participants used were undergraduate students and do not represent the general population. The results may also have been influenced by individual or participant variables, but this research does have good reliability.

    The capacity of short-term memory refers to the amount of information that can be stored at one time. Miller (1956) suggested that most people store about seven independent or discrete items in short-term memory. These may be numbers or words, miller referred to ...

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