Describe and Evaluate the Multi-Store Model of Memory.

Atkinson and Shiffrin proposed the Multi-store model of memory in 1968. The model had two distinct stores known as a Short-term store and a Long term store. The model also unravelled a stimulus from the environment known as the sensory register. The memory model elaborates three stages that take place from information passing to the sensory register then to the short-term memory and eventually stored in the long-term memory.

The main features of the sensory register is its modality specific, therefore information is held in the same sense it is registered e.g a visual image is held as a picture in the person’s memory and taste is held as a taste. The capacity of the sensory register is quite large however it has a very brief duration of approximately half a second. A series of experiments have been conducted by Sperling in 1960 which discovered that the sensory register can hold at least nine items of modality specific information for a brief period of time. From the sensory register information can be lost or can be passed onto the short-term memory. The research was developed by Miller in 1956 called ‘The Magic Number Seven’ in which he discovered that the short-term memory can hold 5-9 items of information, with a capacity that can be extended by ‘chunking information’, e.g broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts and peas can be chunked as one item known as vegetables. In 1959 Peterson and Peterson discovered the duration of the short-term memory as approximately 18 seconds. However the Displacement theory states the STM has limited capacity of storing information therefore when the system is ‘full’ the oldest information is ‘pushed out’ or displaced by incoming information.

The Multi-Store Model of Memory has been criticised for being over-simplistic with viewing that the structures of the STM and LTM operate only in a single, uniform fashion. This is backed up by the Working memory model proposed by Baddeley and Hitch in 1974 that it is a more active model of human processing where the STM is more than one unitary store however compromises a lot of different stores. Also there is not enough evidence to support this theory, even though the multi-store memory of model use laboratory experiments it lacks ecological validity and can be criticised in terms of demand characteristics. Craik and Lockhart (1972) argued information can be processed in different stages which gradually shift from a lower level of analysis to a higher level through three stages; firstly, the shallow/structural level which is a visual level, secondly the intermediate/phonetic level which is the auditory level and thirdly the deep/semantic level which is the stimuli connection to other stimuli’s. In conclusion Craik and Lockhart assumed that memory; attention and perception is co-dependant because the memory traces information that is formed due to the attention and perceptual processes.