Outline three differences between short-term memory (STM) and long-term memory (LTM).

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Diana                                                                                              12th November 2004

COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY

  • Outline three differences between short-term memory (STM) and long-term memory (LTM).

Duration Differences i.e. how long it lasts: - Information held in STM is lost rapidly when there is little or no opportunity to rehearse it since rehearsal would send the information into LTM and it will be easily recalled. This suggests that holding information in STM is only for a few seconds since holding information in STM is fragile and easily forgotten. Peterson and Peterson (1959) concluded this by asking participants to remember trigrams when not allowed to rehearse it. Unlike STM, information can be held in LTM for a long a long period of time and mostly forever. It is said that the elderly never forget their childhood memories. Bahrick, Bahrick and Witlinger (1975) carried out a study into LTM  (where photographs of high school students were taken from the year and ex-students were asked to recall the names of the photographs. They found out that 90% of the names could still be remembered even after 34yrs.

Encoding Differences: - Based on a study carried out by Baddeley (1966), there is evidence that STM is acoustically encoded i.e. encoding by the similarity of the sound of the words e.g. cat, mat, rat…etc, whereas LTM is semantically encoded i.e. encoding by the similarity of the meaning of the words e.g. big, huge, great…etc.

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Capacity Differences: - The capacity of STM is proved by Jacobs (1887) to be about seven items. Jacob used the technique called the “memory span” where participants were expected to repeat letters or digits, which were presented to them in the same order (serial recall). The results showed that STM has a limited storage capacity between 5-9 items and it is determined by the size of digits/letters. In contrary to this, LTM has an unlimited storage capacity and information stored in LTM e.g. names of friends, schools attended, how to ride a bike…etc can be endless.

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