Give a brief account of the differences between Short Term Memory and Long Term Memory and consider the extent to which research supports the distinction between them.

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Information must be acoustic or visual for a person to be able to store it in there Short Term Memory (STM) you can also hold up to 7 chunks of information. In Long Term Memory (LTM), information can be held semantically with an unlimited capacity. Research has been done, and has found that the duration of long term memory in unlimited, compared to the 18 seconds, measured by Peterson Peterson (1959). Baddely (1966) tested the effects of acoustic and semantic similarity on short and long term memory. He gave participants two lists with similar or dissimilar acoustic and semantic words. He found that the PS had difficulty in recalling the acoustically similar words in STM, but not in LTM. This is the total opposite to the semantic lists, that where easily remembered in the STM test. In general, STM appears to story all information acoustically. However, some tests have shown that visual codes are also stored in STM. Brandimote (1992) gave PS a visual test and prevented them from doing any rehearsal before recalling. He found that many PS used visual code, and by giving them a chance to rehearse, where they would usually turn the information into verbal code, and recall was high. Research has also shown that not all encoding in LTM is semantic; Frost (1972) proved that long term recall was related to visual as well as semantic codes. Psychologists believe that LTM has potentially unlimited capacity. The capacity of STM, however, has a very limited capacity. George Miller (1956) reviewed psychological research and concluded that the span of immediate memory is 5-9 items. He also found that people can recall 5 words; just as well as they can recall 5 letters, this is because if you chunk things together, they are easier to remember. However, more recently, Cowen (2001) refutes this theory, and concludes that STM is likely to be limited to about 4 chunks. This
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