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The multi-store model of memory

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Memory warm-up

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Sensory memory

The sensory memory store retains information for very brief periods of time. Imagine you are watching a film. It is presented as a rapid series of frozen images separated by moments of darkness. It is the sensory store that holds this information from one frame of film until the next, which results in your experience of watching continuous visual scenes.

Atkinson and Shiffrin believed that we have a different sensory store for each of our senses: the iconic store (visual), the echoic store (auditory) and the haptic store (tactile). These stores hold information for anything between a few milliseconds (iconic store) and 2 to 3 seconds (auditory store).

The iconic store has attracted the most research.

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The capacity of STM

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STM: capacity, duration & encoding

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LTM: duration and encoding