Evaluating the Levels of Processing Theory

could not process information in it, however, he was still able to store information in his long term memory. This does not account in the Multi-store model and it was realised that there must e another route to the long term memory. It was after this Craik and Lockhart put forward their Levels of Processing theory. In their theory, they stated that rehearsal was not enough and the Multi-store model was far too simplistic and the depth of the information and what you do with it also affects your memory. The depth of the information go from shallow to deep processing. The levels are made up of structural processing which are upper and lower class letters, Phonetic or sound processing which are rhyming words and lastly semantic processing which is about the meanings of the words. The experiment done in our lesson was about different types of processing. Results of that showed that the semantic processing was the one that we had processed the deepest as we had to actually recognise and process the words into our long term memory, and not just based on the appearance of the word. When information is first processed, it goes to the sensory memory. From there if the information I attended to, it will be processed into the short term memory and if not it will probably be lost. If information from the short term memory is rehearsed, it will be processed into the long term memory where it can stay for up to a lifetime. There are two types of rehearsal which are used in different ways of remembering information. These are called elaborative rehearsal and maintenance rehearsal. Maintenance rehearsal involves purely repeating the information over and over again, whereas elaborative rehearsal involves 'doing something' with the material a you repeat it, such as making associations with existing knowledge. Craik and Lockhart theory can be criticised in a few ways. It can be argued that is it really the depth of the processing that lead to the results or the amount of effort we put in which leads to the results? This cannot to a certain extent be answered as we do not know. Another factor would be that the participants would obviously be spending more time on processing the difficult tasks rather than the easier ones, therefore, the results could be affected due to the amount of time spent on the tasks and would that also be fair? Deeper processed information will be done due to more time and more effort spent, therefore it would be difficult to state the factor that influences the results. Another problem was that the levels of processing theory does not explain why the deeper levels of processing are more effective then the shallow levels. It has been criticised as the theory merely describes what happens at the different levels of processing and no more This theory suggests that at early stages information is processed as shallow. It states that the more the information is passed through the systems, it processes deeper and gets transferred into the long term memory. You are more likely to remember information when it has been processed deeper. Jayni Shah