Cognitive Psychology: The Stage Theory Model Of Memory

Human has the ability to learn, relearn, and unlearn. It is the innate ability of human being. When one perceive new information and it is learnt and store in the memory then it will be the knowledge that human received called cognition. Cognition is the study of psychological area which has go beyond the taking in and retrieving information. In cognitive psychology, McLeod defined cognition as the study of the human mental processes which how people encode, structure, store, retrieve, use or otherwise learn knowledge (McLeod, 2015). One of the fundamental area of cognition studied by researchers is memory. There are several aspects of information processing in reference to explains on how the brain encodes or control information as it stored

1). Before describing the processes, it is important to note that the crucial of perception is more than identifying an objects or respond to the environment (Goldstein, 2011). A stage model of memory is first proposed by Broadbent in 1957. The stage theory model recognizes three types or stages of memory: sensory memory, short-term or working memory, and long-term memory (refer to Figure 1 in Appendix 1).

Firstly, human being has the innate ability to respond to the surrounding input which is act as the initial stage of sensory memory. Sensory memory is the initial process of stimuli perception is associated with the senses. It holds all incoming information for seconds or fractions of a second (Goldstein, 2011). During this stage, the occurrence of external stimulus will influence the human’s perception which requires attention. If the stimuli are not detected, then it cannot be further processed and will never become part of the memory store. Perceptions that are not transferred into a higher stage will not be incorporated into memory that can be recalled.

According to Sutcliffe (1951), he states that working memory is the human analogue of computer RAM, strictly speaking, the cache memory of the central processor. Schraw and McCrudden (2013) states that “working memory is a term that is used to refer to a multi-component temporary memory system in which information is assigned meaning, linked to other information, and essential mental operations such as inferences are performed” (p. 1). Working memory has very limited capacity to store information which causes the loss of information if no information rehearsal or repetition is performed as the capacity of working memory only extended from 15-30 seconds (Lutz & Huitt, 2003). In order to process the information, there are two ways are being used. Maintenance rehearsal or rote is the first method. It means information needs to be processed or rehearse or it will lose. According to Huitt (2003), repetition of the content can only be conducted after a few minutes. Next, the information will be incorporated into the memory to be retained. Basically, there are three ways to retain the information within the working memory. Lutz and Huitt (2003) states that the “existing structures will be added to the existing mental representation and no change will occur except its addition” (p. 5). Then, if there is no match with existing structures, additions will be performed to broaden the