The Human Memory

The Human Memory

Many people don't know it but the memory of a human is more complex

than thought to be. The memory can be divided into three stores which

are Sensory, Short term and Long term. There are also two processes

which are Attention and Rehearsal. I will be looking at these sections

closely to help explain the human memory. I will also be looking at

past experiments which will help me support my theory.

The Sensory stores are made up of three parts- Visual sensory memory,

Acoustic sensory memory, touch, smell and motor information. If the

information is not attended to then it can decay. The sensory

information is the environmental input which is kept for two seconds

in the sensory store.

One of the other stores is the short term memory store which is used

to hold information which is passed in by the sensory stores and that

is where the information can be held for seven seconds with out

rehearsal or repetition. The short term memory has very limited

capacity and duration and also rehearses information acoustically

(acoustic encoding). If this did not take place then we could not

place the information into the long term memory after the rehearsal of

the word or the digit. With all this there is a bad point to the short

term memory which is that the information can be lost through

interference, displacement and distraction. All this information is

only forgotten in the short term memory store.

The other store is the long term memory which can hold sufficient

rehearsed information. The information is considered and stored in a

meaningful way organised in terms of its meaning. Like the short term

memory the long t...

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...y as passive stores when they are active

processes. The working memory model demonstrated this is true of short

term memory and so it expanded on the multi-store model to improve on

its reductionism. It does however support the STM/LTM distinction

identified by the multi-store model. A further criticism is that

transfer of information is presented as a one-way process whereas the

interference explanation of forgetting shows that information flow is

two-way.

So after looking at all the weaknesses and the strengths I have come

to the conclusion that the short term memory and the long term memory

both have more weaknesses than strengths but with out them we could

not be able to do anything. Yes they do lose information if not

rehearsed of remembered but they are a great part of are life and we

will need it for ever.