Cognitive Psychology - Short Term Memory

Short term memory has 3 main aspects:

• Limited capacity - only about 7 items can be stored at a time.
• Limited duration - storage is very fragile and information can be lost with distraction or passage of time.
• Encoding - Primarily acoustic.

Miller's magic number 7 (plus or minus two) provides evidence for the capacity of short term memory. Most adults can store between 5-9 items in STM. Miller said that the STM only…