Heather Henry alerted me to these fantastic youtube clips – the multi-store model and the working memory model set to Rudolf the Rednose Reindeer and Jingle Bells. Just in time for Christmas.
Posts tagged with multi-store model
In the January 2011 Unit 1 exam there was a question related to the multistore model (question 4). I was somewhat concerned to find the following comment in the report on the exam
‘A number of answers suggested that the concepts of maintenance and elaborative rehearsal were part of the MSM. Maintenance and elaborative rehearsal were introduced by Craik and Lockhart (1972) as a way of criticising the MSM which had simply relied on ‘rehearsal’ as a means of transferring information to LTM.’
In our Complete Companions we have included elaborative rehearsal in the model because the model was updated in subsequent years. See for example here, I quote from page 3:
What probably confused many people was that Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968) presented in their original paper a model that focused on rehearsal but that did assume some storage in LTS as a function of the length of the rehearsal period. As a result, rehearsal came to be viewed as the mechanism for transfer of information from STS to LTS. In later analyses (Shiffrin, 1975), this aspect was clarified by replacing the terms “rehearsal” and “coding” with “maintenance rehearsal” and “elaborative rehearsal”, respectively. Maintenance rehearsal has the primary function of keeping the information in a readily accessible state while elaborative rehearsal has the primary function of storing information in LTS. Hence, according to the two-store model, it is not the amount of rehearsal per se that determines recall, but rather the amount of elaborative rehearsal.
People often seem to forget that academics do respond to criticisms and make changes to their theories/models. This fluidity of theoretical models should not be penalised in exams.
In the new edition of The Complete Companion (which is now on sale if you haven’t had your copy!) we have presented an updated diagram of the multi-store model which may confuse some people because it is different to the one given in some books – for a reason. The model was first proposed by Atkinson and Shiffrin in 1968, consisting of only two stores – short- and long-term memory. The third store – sensory memory – was added later. This early model is often shown with information being lost through forgetting (as shown below).
In 1971 Atkinson and Shiffrin produced a slightly different diagram, indicating how information is retrieved from memory – via the short term store, as shown below. No mention was made of forgetting. Read the rest of this entry »