{"id":14322,"date":"2021-10-04T11:57:19","date_gmt":"2021-10-04T02:57:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/themantic-education.com\/ibpsych\/?p=14322"},"modified":"2021-10-05T14:31:27","modified_gmt":"2021-10-05T05:31:27","slug":"fun-facts-about-the-multi-store-model-of-memory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themantic-education.com\/ibpsych\/2021\/10\/04\/fun-facts-about-the-multi-store-model-of-memory\/","title":{"rendered":"Four things you didn’t know about the multi-store model of memory"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s in all the textbooks and every introduction to psychology course, but here are some things you didn’t know about Atkinson and Shiffrin’s multi-store model of memory.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

#1. There’s a store within the store<\/h2>\n

The short-term store is where we temporarily hold information in our working memory. If it’s rehearsed enough it will transfer to the long-term store. But did you know about\u00a0the rehearsal buffer?<\/strong> According to A&S, the rehearsal buffer is a store within the short-term store where information is placed if it needs to be rehearsed. Not all information is placed in the rehearsal buffer and it only holds a few items of information.<\/p>\n

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From the original chapter (Atkinson and Shiffrin, 1968)<\/p><\/div>\n

Information that is forgotten might have been bumped out of the rehearsal buffer before it was rehearsed for long enough to create a strong memory trace in the long-term store.<\/p>\n

#2: They weren’t the first\u00a0<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Atkinson and Shiffrin’s model is the one everything thinks of when we say the\u00a0<\/em>multi-store model, but did you know there are lots of multi-store models? In fact, A&S weren’t even the first. In 1967, one year prior to A&S, Murdoch presented his modal model<\/strong> which attempted \u201c\u2026to synthesize some recent theoretical conceptions; the components include sensory, short-term and long-term stores with three different forgetting mechanisms (decay, displacement and interference, respectively).\u201d (Murdoch, 1967). But even his model drew on ideas from a paper from Atkinson and Shiffrin\u2019s in 1965.<\/p>\n

It helps to know the historical context from which psychological theories and models emerged. It’s easy to make the mistake of thinking that psychologists propose a theory from thin air and then test it using experiments. A&S’s MSM is a good example of how it’s often the studies that come first\u00a0<\/em>and the psychologists draw on these findings to create a unified theory.<\/p>\n

A&S’s model was\u00a0evolutionary,\u00a0<\/em>not\u00a0revolutionary<\/i>.<\/p>\n

#3: There’s LOTS of contradictory evidence<\/strong><\/h2>\n

The MSM was first outlined in a 110 page chapter “Human Memory: A Proposed System and its Control Processes.” Despite being one of the most cited articles\u00a0 and having a massive influence in psychology, the theory is not without its critics.<\/p>\n

Let’s just note three commonly cited sources of contradictory evidence (explained in more detail here<\/a>):<\/p>\n