The strengths of the Multi Store Model are that it has a large amount of supporting evidence. The case study of Clive Wearing, by Baddeley (1990), supports the idea that for information to be stored in the Long Term Memory it must move through the Short Term Memory. This is because Clive Wearing’s hippocampus was damaged by an infection, resulting in his loss of ability to transfer information. Another piece of supporting evidence was a study by Glanzer and Cunitz (1966). They gave participants a list of twenty words to learn, and discovered that they tended to remember the first few and the last few, but not the words in the middle. This is because of the primacy effect, where information has been rehearsed and transferred into the Long Term Memory, and the recency effect, where information is still in the Short Term Memory. This supports the idea of rehearsal. Furthermore, brain scans have shown that different areas of the brain are active when using Short Term Memory and Long Term Memory. Beardsley (1997) found that the prefrontal cortex is active when participants did a task involving their Short Term Memories. Squire et al (1992) found that the hippocampus is active when participants used their Long Term Memories. The fact that different areas of the brain are used depending on which part of the memory is used suggests that the two are separate.
However, the Multi Store Model has been criticized because it is oversimplified. Memory is complex, and the Multi Store Model does not show this. For example, it does not take into account that some information may be easier to remember because it is more interesting to the person. Moreover, Shallice and Warrington (1970) found that the Short Term Memory is not a single store, as suggested by the Multi Store Model. In their case study, their participant, KF, had trouble dealing with verbal information in his Short Term Memory, but not with visual information. Spiers et al (2001) found that patients with amnesia had trouble remembering some types of information but not others. This suggests that the Long Term Memory is also not unitary. Finally, Ruchkin et al (2003) suggested that the Short Term Memory was not separate from the Long Term Memory, as suggested by the Multi Store Model, but the part of Long Term Memory which is active at the time. This was because participants were able to recall more real words that pseudo-words, suggesting that they used the meanings of the words to remember them.
In conclusion, although the Multi Store Model is useful for looking at the basic structure of memory, there are many issues with it. It is oversimplified, and so will not take into account many factors when explaining what happens. This means that while it offers a reasonable account of human memory, it does not explain nearly everything about memory.