The other store is the long term memory which can hold sufficient rehearsed information. The information is considered and stored in a meaningful way organised in terms of its meaning. Like the short term memory the long term memory also can lose information. The short term can be lost through trace decay, interference and displacement. This can only be lost in the long term memory.
These three stores are like in a cycle because if the sensory store was not there then the information from the environment input would not be transferred into the short term memory. If the short term memory was not there then the digit or the word which doesn’t get rehearsed does not get put into the long term memory so we will not be able to remember the past or important dates like birthdays or anniversary.
There are few studies which help support my theory and help prove the psychological theory of the human memory. I will be looking at the differences of the short term and the long term in the encoding, capacity and duration. The capacity of the short term memory was tested by the man named Jacob’s in 1887. His aim was to investigate how much information can be held in the short term memory. So to test this he devised a technique called the serial digit span. To test this, a laboratory experiment using the digit span was conducted. The participants were asked to remember numbers of series and this was repeated over a number of trials to establish the participants ‘digit span’. The findings were that the average of the short term is the between 5-9 items. Digits were recalled better (9.3 items) than letters (7.3 items). Individual differences were found with age. By looking at this I can say that the findings show that the short term memory has a limited storage capacity also the duration of the short term also the results will change. If the gap between the numbers is 3 seconds then 90% of the asked digits will be recalled but if the gap was 18 seconds then less than 10% of the asked digits will be remembered. The encoding of the short term memory is the way the information is stored in the memory. The memory will mainly store information acoustically and the most common type is semantic coding (processing information for memory). Another man who tested this was Buddeley who said that after the delay and before the recall of the words of the similar meaning was poorly recalled compared to similar sounding words because of semantic confusion. All this is what makes the short term different from the long term.
I will be looking at the long term to notice the differences. The capacity of the long term is unlimited and is enormous compared to a computer. The capacity of the long term memory must be infinity because of the infinity number of the brain cells unlimited capacity store. Experiments have been conducted and there have come to the conclusions that all past experiences are stored in the long term memory but we often cannot access them so the problem is the accessibility, but others believe that all experience or knowledge is stored at first but eventually disappears or fades and so it’s no longer accessible. It is in fact unavailable so the problem here is unavailability of info. So by looking at both studies we can tell that both of the short term memory and long term memory both have problems if the number, word or important information or even more important information like education learnt.
The brain damage case also provides evidence against the multi-store model, which claims that memory is divided into single stores, in several ways. KF’s Short term memory was clearly more complex than a single store because his visual memory was better than his auditory memory. Research has shown that the long term memory is also not a single store, as both declarative and procedural knowledge have been identified. This indicates that the multi-store model is over simplistic. There is also the case of HM, which demonstrates that rehearsal may be an oversimplification as he was able to form new short term memory and hold it there, i.e., rehearsal, but was not able to transfer this information into the long term memory. Hence, this case study suggests the transfer mechanism may be more complex than simply rehearsal. Rehearsal is not always necessary for memories to become permanent, as in flashbulb memory, which challenges the multi-store emphasis on this. The levels of processing theory also contradicts the multi-store model as it suggests that rehearsal is not important, rather it is the depth of processing that creates memories. The working memory model is also criticised it portrays short term memory and long term memory as passive stores when they are active processes. The working memory model demonstrated this is true of short term memory and so it expanded on the multi-store model to improve on its reductionism. It does however support the STM/LTM distinction identified by the multi-store model. A further criticism is that transfer of information is presented as a one-way process whereas the interference explanation of forgetting shows that information flow is two-way.
So after looking at all the weaknesses and the strengths I have come to the conclusion that the short term memory and the long term memory both have more weaknesses than strengths but with out them we could not be able to do anything. Yes they do lose information if not rehearsed of remembered but they are a great part of are life and we will need it for ever.
