Human Memory — Psychology STD 11 Humanities — Question

Atkinson and Shiffrin model of memory also known as stage model of memory.This proposes the existence of three separate but sequentially linked memory systems, the sensory memory, the short-term memory and the long-term memory.

• The sensory memory: contains a fleeting impression of a sensory stimulus (a sight or a sound). It is initial process that preserves brief impression of stimuli. It has a large capacity. It is of very short duration that is less than a second.
• The short-term memory: a limited recollection of recently perceived stimuli (a telephone number or an order of drinks). It holds small amount of information for a brief periocfof time i.e. less than 30 seconds. It is primarily encoded acoustically.
• The long-term memory: a more or less permanent store of memories for later retrieval (e.g. our telephone numbers). In this stage information’s are encoded semantically and storage capacity is unlimited.

Each of these memory systems is seen as differing in the way they process information, how much information they can hold and for how long they can hold that information.
The model can be expressed in the following diagram: