The Stages Of Memory And How The Staged Interact - 2295 Words

Memory is one’s ability to encode, retain and recall stored information of what happens, happened or what is happening in our daily life. Memories not only demonstrate the brain’s complexity but also not simply recorded and neatly stored. Our memories are selected, constructed, and edited not just by us but by the world around us. In 1960s, Atkinson and shiffrin developed the three model of how our memory system for example information enters from our physical environment through our senses into our sensory memory and the moves to our short term memory and finally to the long term memory and then back to the short term memory when we need to reuse the information. This paper will be discussing the three stages of memory and how the staged†¦show more content†¦Iconic memory registers an exact copy of the incoming visual input but only for a brief period of time which is less than one second. The capacity of the iconic memory is known to be large although its dur ation is very limited for example in sperling’s full report procedure, he had his participants try to report the entire matrix of letters but over a couple of trials, the participants recalled 4 to5 letters on average and when he tried his other procedure which is the sperling’s partial report procedure, the participants only had to report a small part of the presented letter matrix which included , an indicated row by an auditory cue on each trial. A high pitched tone indicated that the top row had to be recalled, a medium- pitched tone which was the middle row and the low pitched tone which was the bottom row. With this procedure, sperling found that as the time delay increased, the participants’ recall of the cued row worsened which meant that the matrix was fading very quickly from the memory. SHORT TERM MEMORY The second stage of memory is called the working memory which is defined as the brief, immediate memory for a limited amount of material that we are currently processing and it also actively coordinates our ongoing working materials. Working memory is sometimes called the short term memory and when this information is rehearsed, it’s transferred into a more permanent storage and it is remembered at a later time. We can