Cognitive Psychology

The retaining of information of past events.

Repeating information to one's self so it can be remembered. This will keep the information in STM until it is rehearsed enough to be transfered to LTM.

2 hours to 100+ years

- Showed 624 memorable pictures to partisipants - An hour later he showed them again to partisipants amongst other pictures -There was almost perfect recollection of the pics -4 months later 50% of the pictures where remembered

-He asked variously aged people to put names to faces from thier high school year book - 48 years on people where 75% accurate

-Partisipants where asked to remember nonsense trigrams and 3 numbers. -They where then asked to count backwards in 3's and 4's for different amounts of time in the experiment (3 secs, 6 secs, 9 secs, 12 secs and 18 secs)(this was known as the retention interval) - There where 2 practice runs and 8 real ones for each partisipant -Nonsense trigram had no significance to any shorthand terms e.g 'BBC' -90% was recalled on the 3 second retention interval, and 2% on the 18 second one -This suggests STM must then last for about 20 seconds

- Items could be recalled for as long as 96 seconds -Partisipants where asked to recall the same items across trials.This would lead to interference between newer and older items. - Seems that STM can last a while unless it is overwritten by newer information.

1. There are other kinds of memory. For example what my brothers look like or what I did last friday night. But there again, there are times when we remember words (e.g names of drinks) and phone numbers at the pub. 2. Duration was not tested! The backward counting displace the nonsense syllable in the STM. It wiped the memory out.

STM Encoding:acoustic or visual duration: measured in seconds capacity: less than 7 chunks LTM Encoding:semtantics duration: hours, days and years capacity: unlimited