Memory is the process of how we store, encode and retrieve information. One model that attempts to explain memory is the multi store model by Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968). According to this model, memory can flow through 3 separate memory stores; Sensory, short term and long term memory. Any stimulus that you come across has been in one or more of these stores.
Sensory memory is viewed as a storage system that contains information in its unprocessed form for a very small amount of time, can be less than a second, this information is gone after the stimulus is no longer there. There are two types of sensory storage; iconic stage which is associated to visual information, then there is echoic storage which is associated to auditory information.
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The participants were shown a consonant trigram and asked to count backwards from three as they rehearsed the letters, they had short bursts of time to rehearse beginning with three seconds and increasing by threes up to eighteen seconds. After the three second interval the participants could recall majority of the letters but as they reached eighteen second intervals the number of letters being recalled decreased significantly. They concluded that the information decayed as it was not rehearsed.
Then in 1966 Baddeley found that long term memory mainly uses semantic coding, whilst short term memory uses acoustic coding. He had participants take part in an experiment where they were shown a short list of words which were semantically similar and then they were shown a list of acoustically similar words. They were then asked to recall the words straight after, which caused confusion with the acoustically similar words but the words with similar meanings were easier to recall. However after a short period of time the semantically similar words were more