1. The capacity of STM

2. STM: capacity, duration & encoding
Worksheet:
The teacher handout 1_2_STM_capacity_class_demo.doc accompanies this slide.
Print the handout and use it to illustrate STM capacity. After reading out each line ask students to write down what they recall.
At the end of the demonstration ask the students their thoughts:
How was the experience?
Did anyone have a high capacity for recalling the digits? If so, what were their strategies for recall?
What can influence the capacity of STM?
Use the discussion to demonstrate the idea of ‘chunking’ – increasing capacity by clustering information together e.g becomes 1989.
References:
Jacobs, J. (1887) Experiments in prehension. Mind, 12, 75-79
Miller, G.A. (1956) The magic number seven, plus or minus two: some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psychological Review, 63, 81-93
Peterson, L.R. and Peterson, M.J. (1959) Short-term retention of individual verbal items. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 58, 193-8
Conrad (1964) Acoustic confusions in immediate memory. British Journal of Psychology, 55, 75-84
Brandimonte, M.A., Hitch, G.J. and Bishop, D.V.M. (1992) Influence of short-term memory codes on visual processing: evidence from image transformation tasks. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 18,

3. LTM: capacity
The capacity of LTM is difficult to quantify and investigate, however it is generally thought that LTM can hold an unlimited amount of information.
As the capacity of LTM is so vast, it requires information storage to be highly organized in order to aid retrieval.
Image credits:
Photo © Kuzmin Andrey, shutterstock.com

4. LTM: duration and encoding
Worksheet:
The worksheet 1_2_MSM_summary.doc accompanies this presentation.
The solution can be found on the handout 1_2_MSM_summary_answer.doc.
This worksheet is designed as a review of the differences between STM and LTM in terms of capacity, duration, encoding and information loss.
References:
Baddeley, A.D. (1966a) The influence of acoustic and semantic similarity on long term memory for word sequences. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 18, 302-9
Baddeley, A.D (1966b) Short-term memory for word sequences as a function of acoustic, semantic and formal similarity. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 18, 362-5
Bahrick, H.P., Bahrick, P.O and Wittinger, R.P. (1975) Fifty years of memory for names and faces: a cross-sectional approach. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 104, 54-75