short term memory: encoding, capacity, duration studies

short and long term memory evidence

when asked to remember a list of objects people tend to remember those at the start of the list (primacy effect) and those at the end (recency effect). those remembered at the start have enough time to go into lon term memory and those at the end are still in the short term memory when recalled

short term memory

capacity

• how much information can be held
• George miller measured capacity of STM and found people could remember 7=/-2 chunks. this means people remember between 5 and 9 bits of information

evaluation

• mr simon said that capacity can be effected by size of chunk as we remember fewer larger chunks
• other research found that time taken to say a chunk effects the number remembered. the quicker we say then the more we remember

encoding

information gets into STM by visual, acoustic or semantic encoding

conrad

• experiment using repeated measures…