Quick questions on Atkinson and Shiffrin's multi-store model of memory - Edexcel GCSE Psychology

Information from the senses (sight, sound, touch) enters here first. It has a large capacity but a very brief duration (a fraction of a second to about two seconds). Most of it is lost almost at once.

If information in the sensory register is given attention, it passes into STM. STM has a limited capacity (about seven items) and a short duration (about 18 to 30 seconds without rehearsal), with mainly acoustic encoding.

If information in STM is rehearsed, it transfers into LTM, which has an effectively unlimited capacity and a very long duration (up to a lifetime), with mainly semantic encoding.

The model is supported by evidence. The primacy and recency effect (people recall the first and last items of a list best) suggests STM and LTM are separate stores, because the first items have been rehearsed into LTM and the last are still in STM. Case studies of amnesia show one store can be damaged while the other works, again suggesting separate stores.

The model is oversimplified. It treats STM as a single store, but evidence suggests STM has several parts (for example handling sounds and images separately). It also overstates rehearsal: we remember many things without deliberately rehearsing them, and deep, meaningful processing matters more than the sheer amount of rehearsal.

What moves information from the sensory register into short-term memory? [1 mark]

Name the three stores of the multi-store model in order. [3 marks]

Explain one weakness of the multi-store model. [2 marks]