Short Term Memory

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Short-term Memory (STM) or "Working Memory"(WM) In the Atkinson and Shiffrin model, information from the sensory memory enters the STM if it is attended to. The Short term memory is also called ‘working memory’ and holds a limited amount of information for a short period of time (about 18 seconds). Once information enters the short term memory it needs to be converted to a code. research indicates the most commonly used code is phonological/acoustic code (based on sound). At times however, encoding in WM may be visual as well as when some people remember the information in terms of images. Some children possess ‘eidetic imagery’ or photographic memory where they can remember contents of a page in terms of an image. In one classical experiment by Conrad, 1964 it was found that that “F” was most often misidentified as “S” or “X” two letters that sound similar to “F”. Thus, even though the participants saw the letters, the mistakes they made were based on the letters’ sound. From these results Conrad’s concluded that the code for STM is phonological (based on sound of stimulus) rather than visual (based on appearance of the stimulus). The Capacity of Working memory is measured through the digit span test. For e.g the experimenter speaks aloud a list of digits or alphabets. The participant’s task is to recall the as many digits as possible in exactly the same order. The maximum number of digits recalled is an indication of digit span or capacity of the subject. WM has limited capacity of 7 + 2 chunks (or groups). this is referred to as the "magical number seven" as stated by Miller (1956). According to Miller, chunking occurs when we group individual letters or numbers into a larger meaningful unit, for example your phone number. The duration of WM without rehearsal is about 18 to 20 seconds (Peterson & Peterson, 1959) and can sometimes be extended to 30

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