Summary: The Duration Of Short Term Memory

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Introduction to Memory: Memory is the ability of the brain to store, retain, and subsequently recall information. Although traditional studies of memory began in the realms of philosophy the late nineteenth and early twentieth century put memory within the paradigms of cognitive psychology. In the recent decades, it has become one of the principal pillars of a new branch of science that represents a marriage between cognitive psychology and neuroscience, called cognitive neuroscience. Meaning of memory: The mental capacity or faculty of retaining and reviving facts, events, impressions, etc., or of recalling or recognizing previous experiences. Definition of memory: Memory is the term given to the structures and processes involved in the storage …show more content…

They presented participants with trigrams (groups of 3 letters that do not make a word) and asked them to recall them after intervals of 0, 3, 6, 9, 12, 15, and 18 seconds. To stop participants simply repeating the trigrams in their heads (rehearsal) they asked them to count out loud backwards in threes from a certain number (an interference task). The findings were that the accuracy of recall steadily declined until less than 10% of trigrams were recalled after 18 seconds. From this and similar research we can conclude that the duration of short term memory is around 12-30 …show more content…

The participants were 392 graduates from an American high school over a 50 year period who were shown pictures from their yearbooks. Participants were divided into 2 groups: in the recognition group they were asked to select the correct name from a list of names for each photo; and the recognition group they were asked to remember the names of the people in the photos without being given a list of possible names. The recognition group were 90% accurate 14 years after graduation, dropping to 60% accuracy 47 years after graduation. The recall group were 60% accurate 7 years after graduation and less than 20% after 47 years. The conclusion from this is that people evan remember creation types of information for almost an entire lifetime (47 years after graduation is almost a lifetime), and that recognition memory tasks based on recognition seem to be better than ones based on