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.

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