Lecture notes
Coding, capacity and duration
These notes both go into detail and keep the information simple about coding, capacity and duration. These notes were written in 2022.
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-Coding, capacity and duration:-Sensory Register (SR)- Not under cognitive control like STM and LTM, sensory information is
recorded automatically. Any information from the STM or the LTM was initially gathered by the SR.
Coding- Store depends on the sense organ that the information comes from, iconic= vision,
echoic= sound, haptic= touch, gustatory= taste, olfactory= smell.
Capacity- Very large, must contain all the sense impressions for all the senses in the
moment. However, only what is paid attention to is passed to STM (Supportive research-
Spearling, in which a grid of 20 letters were flashed onto a screen for a 20 th of a second.
Suggests the rows were stored in the SR as the participants did not know what row was
going to be needed. Means iconic SR has a large capacity).
Duration- Is very short, as low as 250 milliseconds. As so much information is held, it cannot
be retained for long. However, each store has a different duration.
-Short Term Memory (STM)- Temporary active store, receiving information from the SR by paying
attention to it and keeping it in the STM or passing information on to the LTM.
Coding- Information in STM seems to be stored acoustically (in the form of sound/spoken
words) (Supportive research- Baddeley 1966 gave 4 10-word lists to 4 participant groups, 1)
Acoustically similar, 2) Acoustically dissimilar, 3) Semantically similar and 4) Semantically
dissimilar. He found that immediate recall was worst for list 1 and recall after 20 minutes
was worst with list 3. This suggests that information in STM is acoustic, recalling 1 was most
difficult as similar sounds caused confusion in recall).
Capacity- Miller suggested that this is small, approximately 7 items +/- 2 items (5-9) and this
can be improved by chunking, making small sets/groups of items. This reduces the number
of items overall (Supportive research- Jacobs 1887, presented participants with lists of
letters or numbers. Participants then had to recall the list. Found that the capacity for letters
was 7 and the capacity for numbers was 9. This suggests that the capacity of STM is very
limited).
Duration- Is short, 18-30 seconds. However, duration of information can be extended by
verbal rehearsal (rehearsal loop) (Supportive research- Peterson and Peterson, who showed
participants three letter trigrams HFR, TKD. Participants had to count backwards for a few
seconds to stop maintenance rehearsal (interference task). Found that after 18 seconds
recall was less than 10%. This suggests that information retains in STM for only a few
seconds before it disappears).
-Long Term Memory (LTM)- Very long duration and capacity store may last permanently and be
unlimited in the amount of information it can contain. In order to use this information, it needs to be
passed back into STM. There are several different types of LTM.
Coding- Information in LTM is stored semantically, or in the form of the “meaning”
(Supportive research- Baddeley 1966 gave 4 10-word lists to 4 participant groups, 1)
Acoustically similar, 2) Acoustically dissimilar, 3) Semantically similar and 4) Semantically
dissimilar. He found that immediate recall was worst for list 1 and recall after 20 minutes
was worst with list 3. This suggests that information in LTM is semantic, recalling 3 was the
most difficult as the similar meanings caused confusion in recall).
Capacity- No limit has been found to the amount of information that can be stored in the
LTM. Information can be lost, but this isn’t because it is ‘out of room’. It may still be in LTM
but not accessible (Supportive research- Wagnaar 1986, created a diary over 2400 events for
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