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What Is Short-Term Memory?

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Memory plays an important role in individuals of all walks of life. It is the process in which allows us to receive and retain vast amounts of information about events that have happened to us in the past. Information from our day-to-day lives is absorbed by our senses in different ways: through images (visual), sounds (acoustic) or meaning (semantic). Without memory, we would have no recollection of the past or even think about the future: what events have or will occur, recognise the faces of loved ones, or even learning basic movements and skills like how to speak.

Biologically, it’s claimed that the region of the brain linked with processing information from our short-term memory is the Neocortex, found in the frontal lobe of the brain, whereas the Hippocampus is considered the region linked with long-term memory. Cognitively, short-term memory is linked to a computer’s thought process whereas long-term memory is seen as permanent storage, also known as a hard drive; capable of accessing storage in order to retrieve items and information. …show more content…
According to Miller (1956), the average person is able to recall between 5-9 digits; the limited capacity of short-term memory is therefore represented as 7±2 digits whereas, contrastingly, long-term memory is thought to have an unlimited capacity and duration as it is difficult to

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