Glanzer and Cunitz (1966) did a study trying to prove that memory can be separated in to three distinct stores. They gave participants a list of words and asked to recall the words in any order. Half of the participants were able to recall immediately (condition 1) the other half had to count backwards for 30 seconds, they did this as an interference task. The results showed that condition 1 participants showed primacy effect, which is the words they heard first, and the recency effect which is where they only recalled the last few words in the list. Participants in condition 2 only showed only the primacy effect as they only remembered words from the start of the list. This study supports the MSM by providing evidence that memory is in three distinct stores.
The primacy effect, is where information processed earlier is constantly being rehearsed, which results in the information being encoded in to the LTM. The recency effect is where the last bit of information processed into your memory due to the 18-30 second duration rate, thus easily recalled.
In the LTM, the capacity is unlimited due to the infinite rate of duration, the information may last all of your life here. Information may also travel back to the STM, when being rehearsed. However information may decay over time, or maybe lost due to disease. It can also be lost through retrieval failure.
A further study to support the MSM is the case study of H.M. As a result severe epilepsy H.M. underwent brain surgery to remove the hippocampus from both sides of his brain to reduce it. H.M’s personality and intellect remained the same, but he could not form new LTM’s. His STM was generally normal; however, he could not transfer the information into the LTM. This gives supporting evidence that there of different stored in the memory. However it was only tested on the one person, so it is lacking in population validity. H.M. also had epilepsy beforehand, there for you cannot know it this effect the memory. However the study was very high in ecological validity as it was a real life situation.
Despite giving evidence that there are separate stores of memory, the H.M study cannot be used to explain why his LTM was intact, whereas H.M’s STM was damaged as the MSM suggests that all information must pass through the STM to reach the LTM, hence the referral to it being a linear model.
The MSM is also criticised for being oversimplified compared to other models, such as the working memory model, which study suggest STM is three different stores. It’s oversimplified because, it focusses mainly on structure, and too little on the processes of memory. It also uses a lot of lap experiments, there for you are more likely to have demand characteristics.
Lastly the LTM may help us interpret information in our STM, but in the MSM, there is no such suggestion or enough emphasis on the short term, or long term components.