Developed by Atkinson and sheffrin .
External stimuli from the environment, first enters the sensory store. Information here can be lost through decay, if rehearsed though however it is passed on short term store with the capacity of 7 plus or minus two. A duration of 30 seconds and encodes acoustically. Information here can be lost by displacement or decay however if rehearsed it goes onto the long term store with an unlimited capacity and duration and encodes semantically. Recoding may be needed between the separate stores.
Evaluation:
• It distinguishes between the separate stores in terms of capacity duration and encoding. Evidence of the separate stores comes from people with brain damage, for example milner studied a man named h.m with a brain impairment after a major brain surgery. He could remember his past events before the surgery accurately and could speak, but he could not lay down any new information. When told of his uncle who had recently died he reacted with a considerable amount of grief, when told again however he acted with the same amount of grief and this suggests that there are separate stores.
• The multistore model is to simple and inflexible it doesn’t mention that certain items are easier to remember simply because they are funny or sad Atkinson and shiffrin did not take account for this
• Also rote rehearsal is not the only way to remember items. People go about in life acquiring new information everyday but they don’t have to repeat it to themselves out loud for them be able to remember it.
• They mention that the order of the stores are sequential, but if the letter M is seen for the short term memory to accept it as the letter M it has to be changed and acoustically encoded which means information about the letter M which is the shape and the sound of the letter M has to come from the LTM which means that a backflow of information happens and suggests that the stores are not sequential but rather interactive.
• There are lab experiments like glazer and cuntiz that support the idea of separate stores. Their aim was to find the existence of the separate short term and long term stores. They showed participants a list of words to remember at one time they were split in to two groups. The recall group and the delay group. The findings showed that the recall group were able to remember the first and last words accurately, the delay group could remember the beginning of the list accurately and they both had difficulty remembering the middle of the list. They concluded that the recall group could remember the last words easily because they had been stored in the ltm and the beginning of the list were still in the stm. However the delay group because rehearsal was prevented the end of the words could not be stored and so only the beginning of the words which were stored in the STM could be remembered. Which proves the existence of the separate stores
However this is a laboratory experiment which means it lacks ecological validity.
• The WMM cast doubts on the multistore model and says that the memory is not a unitary system.
WORKING MEMORY MODEL: The working memory model contains the central executive which then contains subsidiary systems. Stimuli first enters the
1. Central executive which is the main component and controls the slave system, it takes part in planning and synthesizing and also problem solving e.g. mental arithmetic it controls the
2. Phonological loop: which is thought to have two components the phonological store which is the inner ear and controls acoustically coded items and stores them for brief periods and the articulatory control process which is the inner voice and controls speech based items, and takes part in maintenance rehearsal called articulatory suppression.
3. The visuospatial sketchpad which stores visual data and sets up and manipulates mental images. It has a limited capacity.
4. The episodic buffer which integrates the