Describe the Evidence for the Distinction Between Stm and Ltm

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Describe the evidence for the distinction between STM and LTM The multi store claims that STM and LTM are separate and distinct stores. Glanzer and Cunitz (1966) illustrate this by creating a laboratory experiment. They gave their participants a series of words and presented them one at a time to test their free recall. However, there were two conditions and these were that they first had to recall words immediately once they had been presented and condition 2 was that the participants were given a distractor task after the words had been presented and had to count backwards in threes before 30 seconds before they were asked to recall the words. Their findings show that the outcome was that people were better at recalling the words both at the beginning and the end of the list more easily than those in the middle. This related well to the Atkinson and Shiffrin model, where the words at the beginning would have gone into the LTM loop and words at the end of the list into the STM loop for rehearsal. They explained that that counting backwards displaced the last few words from the fragile STM but not affected the first few words as these were rehearsed. The recency effect disappears with a distractor task but not the primary effect suggests the two effects are the result of different memory stores. Brenda Miller made a study on a young man, HM, who had his hippocampus and parts of his temporal lobes removed. He could remember events that happen during the early stages of his life but was not able to remember events 10 years before the surgery. He could remember 6 words in order which shows he has STM intact. However, he could not remember psychologists who he spent a lot of time with or realised that he was repeatedly reading the same magazine. His LTM was defected and was no longer able to remember new memories. This suggests there are independent STM and LTM stores.

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