Name: Saad Mazhar Qureshi

ID: SP12-BB-0056

Course: Introduction to Psychology

Section: B

Article on: Short Term Memory

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Submitted to: Ma’am Zaib un Nisa

Short-term memory, also known as primary or active memory, includes the information we are currently aware of or thinking about. Most of the information kept in short-term memory will be stored for approximately 20 to 30 seconds, but it can be even less if rehearsal or active maintenance of the information is prevented. The capacity of short-term memory can vary, but recent research suggests that people are capable of storing approximately four chunks or pieces of information in short-term memory.

Short term memory is part of the memory storage system which is capable of storing material for a brief period of time and to some extent it determines how well the rest of your intelligences are utilized. At any one time short term memory can contain seven, plus or minus two, "chunks" of information. If short term memory tries to acquire more items than it can handle, the middle items will often be displaced. Items remain in short term memory around twenty seconds. Substantial evidence exists to support a general dependency of reasoning

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upon short term memory capacity. The longer information is stored in short term memory the easier it is to manipulate information needed in the execution of complex cognitive tasks (e.g. short term memory has been shown to be correlated with problem solving, learning, reasoning, and reading comprehension).

It is closely related to "working memory"—is like a receptionist for the brain. As one of two main memory types, short-term memory is responsible for storing information temporarily and determining if it will be dismissed or transferred on to long-term memory. Although it sounds complicated, this process takes your short-term memory less than a minute to complete. For example, it is helping you right now by storing information from the beginning of this sentence, so that you can make sense of the end of it. More recently, scientists have begun to dive a little deeper into "short-term" brain functions and have added a separate (but similar) type of memory,” working" memory.

Case Study :

Its capacity is also very limited: George A. Miller (1956), when working at Bell Laboratories, conducted experiments showing that the store of short-term memory was 7±2 items (the title of his famous paper, "The magical number 7±2"). Modern estimates of the capacity of short-term memory are lower,

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typically of the order of 4–5 items; however, memory capacity can be increased through a process called chunking. For example, in recalling a ten-digit telephone number, a person could chunk the digits into three groups: first, the area code (such as 123), then a three-digit chunk (456) and lastly a four-digit chunk (7890). This method of remembering telephone numbers is far more effective than attempting to remember a string of 10 digits; this is because we are able to chunk the information into meaningful groups of numbers. This may be reflected in some countries in the tendency to display telephone numbers as several chunks of three numbers, with the final four-number group generally broken down into two groups of two.

When reading a list the first and last items are remembered better than middle words. The two memory processes that cause this to happen are called the primacy and recency effects. Try to schedule frequent short breaks as this will create more primacy/recency peaks helping you to remember more information. The longer you study the bigger the dip in recall between the primacy and recency effects.

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