SHORT TERM MEMORY
Short Term Memory (STM) is the capacity
for holding small amount of information for
relatively shorter period of time
CHARACTERSTICS OF SHORT TERM
MEMORY
limited capacity only about 7 (plus or minus two) items
can be stored at a time.
limited duration storage is very fragile and information
can be lost with distraction or passage of time.
Information is stored for 30 Seconds.
George Miller in 1956
suggest that the number
of objects an average
human can hold in STM is
between 5 and 9 (7 ± 2),
which Miller described as
“magical number”
ACTIVITY
Try to remember the following list of digits
(individual digits)
19254981121
Now try to memorize them in the following
groups:
1 9 25 49 81 121
Finally memorize them in the following
manner:
12 32 52 72 92 112
What difference do you observe?
CHUNKING
Through chunking it is possible to expand the
capacity of STM which is otherwise 7+2.
For example,
If you are told to remember a string of digits such
as 194719492004
You may create
the chunks as 1947, 1949, and 2004 and
remember them as the year when India became
independent, the year when the Indian
Constitution was adopted, and the year when
the tsunami hit the coastal regions of India and
South East Asian countries.
MAINTENANCE REHEARSAL
As the name suggests, these kinds of rehearsals
simply maintain information through repetition and
when such repetitions discontinue the information is
lost.
Example In the movie Finding
Nemo, Dory, a fish with short
term memory loss, repeats the
address over and over again to
remember it. "P. Shirman 42
Wallaby Way Sydney"
You go shopping, muttering
"milk, butter, eggs..." to yourself
in order to remember what you
need to buy.
You look at a phone number in
your phone so you can dial it and
keep repeating it over and over
again until you get to the dialing
screen
Driving along a road looking for a
house while repeating the house
number to yourself
Psychologists have suggested that the
short-term memory is not unitary, rather
it may consist of many components. This
multicomponent view of short-term
memory was first proposed by Baddeley
(1986) who suggested that the short-
term memory is not a passive storehouse
but rather a work bench that holds a
wide variety of memory materials that
are constantly handled, manipulated and
transformed as people perform various
cognitive tasks. This work bench is called
the working memory.
That bit of memory you are USING when you
are WORKING on something.”
Work this out in your heads in silence...
17 + 29 + 30 = 76
43 + 12 + 23 = 78
What process do you use to
work these out?
PHONOLOGICAL LOOP
The phonological loop is the part of working memory
that deals with spoken and written material. It can be
used to remember a phone number. It consists of
two parts
❑Phonological Store (inner ear) – Linked to speech
perception Holds information in speech-based
form (i.e. spoken words) for 1-2 seconds.
❑Articulatory control process (inner voice) – Linked
to speech production. Used to rehearse and store
verbal information from the phonological store.
VISUAL – SPATIAL SKETCH
PAD
The visuo-spatial sketch pad (inner eye) deals
with visual and spatial information. Visual
information refers to what things look like. It
is likely that the visuo-spatial sketch pad plays
an important role in helping us keep track of
where we are in relation to other objects as
we move through our environment
(Baddeley, 1997).
CENTRAL EXECUTIVE
The central executive is the most important
component of the model, although little is
known about how it functions. It is
responsible for monitoring and coordinating
the operation of the slave systems (i.e. visuo-
spatial sketch pad and phonological loop) and
relates them to Long Term Memory (LTM).
The central executive decides which
information is attended to and which parts of
the working memory to send that information
to be dealt with.
EPISODIC BUFFER
The episodic buffer acts as a 'backup'
store which communicates with both
long term memory and the components
of working memory.
Integrates information from all other
areas.
Let’s Summarize
