Usful Psychology Faces

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  1. Capacity is the ability to absorb, retain and contain information. Capacity refers to the amount of information a certain person can store and the ability to recall this information.  

  1. Duration refers to how long an individual can hold a certain amount of information for. This could refer to how many individual digits you can remember or how many groups of items you can recall.

  1. Encoding refers to transforming one type of information into another. Encoding in psychology can refer to the process in which one stimulus which could be visual, acoustic or semantic is encoded into a certain memory which could be long term memory or short term memory.

  1. The capacity of the short term memory was studied by two famous psychologists, Jacob and Miller. Jacob’s study into the capacity of the STM found that the average STM span was between 5 and 9 individual items which is a very limited storage capacity. A study by Miller agreed with Jacob in the sense he agreed that the capacity of the STM is very limited however he believed that our STM span is determined on how many chunks of information we remember rather than the number of individual letters or numbers which Jacob believed. Miller found that participants can remember between 5 and 9 chunks of information at any one time. Miller believed that chunks were the basic unit of the STM, he called this “Miller’s chunking theory” and disagreed with “Jacobs digit span theory” which he believed was a vague look on the Short term memory.
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  1. The duration of the short term memory was studied by Peterson and Peterson. The study’s findings showed that information in the STM remains their for a very limited amount of time they concluded that it only stays in the STM for less than 18 seconds if verbal rehearsal in prevented. Peterson and Peterson’s experiment consisted of presenting participants with a consonant trigram and after preventing rehearsal for a selection of different times. Peterson and Peterson found that as the time intervals became longer until after 18 seconds participants could remember fewer than 10% of information. They concluded that ...

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