AQA A Level Psychology Notes - MEMORY

Describe and evaluate the multi-store model of memory

AO1- KNOWLEDGE 

Sensory Register – information is held at each of the senses, capacity of these registers is very large, but duration is about 200 milliseconds. If information is not looked at consciously, it can be lost via decay.

STM – when information from the sensory register is paid attention to, it transfers to STM. Capacity - 7 ± 2 items according to Miller. However, this can be increased by chunking. If this memory store gets full new information starts to displace old information. Duration – 18-30 seconds without rehearsal. Mainly uses acoustic coding and information must be rehearsed to be transferred to LTM.

LTM – said to have unlimited capacity and duration. Encoding is primarily semantic. To retrieve information from LTM it is passed back to STM.

Glanzer and Cunitz conducted a study to demonstrate the primacy and recency effect. If asked to remember a list of words, words from the beginning and end of the list tend to be remembered better than words in the middle. The high level of recall at the beginning is the primacy effect where your STM is quite empty allowing room for rehearsal and pass information to LTM. Therefore, we can conclude that our memory consists of qualitatively different stores.

AO3- EVALUATION

Studies using brain scanning techniques demonstrated that STM and LTM are separate unitary stores. It was found that the prefrontal cortex was active during STM tasks and the hippocampus was active during LTM tasks. The fact that different areas of the brain are used during different tasks shows that STM and LTM are separate stores and are located in different areas of the brain.  

Supporting evidence comes from the case study of H.M, a man with severe epilepsy who had his hippocampus removed. After this, he could remember 6 numbers in the order they were presented in but could not form new memories nor remember his past memories. This is evidence that the STM and LTM are separate, unitary stores. He could, however, still tie his shoelaces and understand words. This indicates that his LTM was only partially defective, indicating that the MSM is too simplistic as there may be more than one LTM store.

A criticism of the MSM is that it overemphasises the role of maintenance rehearsal. Craik and Lockhart suggest that LTMs are created by the type of processing rather than the amount of rehearsal. Information that is more deeply processed is more likely to be transferred to the LTM than information that was shallowly processed. This explains why we can remember life events without rehearsing them. This contradicts the multi store model because it suggests that rehearsal is not the only way to create a long-term memory.

Research studies into memory lack ecological validity. This is because many of the studies are conducted in the lab with artificial stimuli, thus does not resemble everyday memory tasks. For example, we would not try to remember meaningless trigrams as participants were…