Evaluate the Multi-Store Model of Memory. Refer to Evidence in Your Answer.

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Evaluate the multi-store model of memory. Refer to evidence in your answer. The multi-store model of memory (MSM) has research that supports it and research that criticises it. Murdock (1962) asked participants to recall a list of 10-30 words in any order they wanted. He found that words presented early in the list or at the end of the list were more often recalled and the words presented in the middle were more often forgotten. This suggests that words at the start of the list were put in to the long term memory (LTM), primary effect, as the person had time to rehearse the words, and words at the end of the list were put in to the short term memory (STM), recency effect, words in the middle of the list were there for too long to be retained in the STM but not long enough to be retained in the LTM. Murdock argues that participants remember primary and recency information from two separate stores (LTM and STM) therefore supporting the MSM. Studies in to Korsakov’s syndrome also support the MSM as sufferers have very limited STM, but very good LTM, suggesting that they are separate stores of information. Many of the studies that support the MSM use laboratory experiments which are known for their lack of ecological validity. Findings from the experiments tell us little about how memory works in real life situations. The case of KF showed that his STM for verbal material was poor but his STM for visual material was normal. This would suggest that the view of the STM being a single store is an oversimplification. Different types of LTM have been identified since the invention of the MSM. Tulving (1989) injected radioactive gold in to his blood stream and thought about LTMs, with semantic meanings and episodic meanings, and found that semantic and episodic memories are stored in different parts of the brain. This shows that LTM is more complex than being purely just

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