- Define and explain The Multi-Store Model in your own words
- Use key terms such as rehearsal accurately
- Apply what you have learned to new examples and questions
- Avoid the common mistakes learners make with this topic
This lesson focuses on The Multi-Store Model: meet Atkinson and Shiffrin's model of how memories flow from the sensory register through short-term to long-term memory.
Meet Atkinson and Shiffrin's model of how memories flow from the sensory register through short-term to long-term memory.
Key ideas
Memory moves through stores
Atkinson and Shiffrin's 1968 multi-store model describes information flowing through three stores: the sensory register, which holds fleeting sights and sounds for fractions of a second; short-term memory, which holds about seven items for under half a minute unless rehearsed; and long-term memory, which can store vast amounts for a lifetime. Information only reaches long-term memory if it is attended to and rehearsed — which is why zoning out in class means the lesson never gets stored.
Long-term memory has different types
Tulving distinguished episodic memory — memories of personal events, like your last birthday — from semantic memory — knowledge of facts and meanings, like knowing Paris is the capital of France. A third type, procedural memory, holds skills like riding a bike, which you remember how to do even when you cannot explain it. These types can be damaged separately: people with amnesia may lose episodic memories while their procedural skills stay intact, showing the stores are genuinely distinct.
Key term — rehearsal: Repeating or thinking about material to keep it in short-term memory or move it into long-term memory.
Imagine: someone tells you a new 11-digit phone number while music is playing, and you try to remember it without writing it down. Ten seconds later it is gone. Explain what happened using the multi-store model.
The sound enters the sensory register but fades within seconds. With your attention split by the music, little transfers into short-term memory. Eleven digits exceed short-term memory's capacity of about 7±2 items. With no rehearsal or chunking, the trace decays within seconds. Nothing is ever encoded, so long-term memory holds no record of the number.
Answer: The number reached the sensory register and briefly short-term memory, but without full attention it could not be maintained. Eleven ungrouped digits overloaded the 7±2 capacity and decayed before encoding — so it never reached long-term memory. Chunking it into groups and repeating it aloud would have given it a chance.
- Short-term memory can hold unlimited information Short-term memory is strictly limited: about seven items, lasting under half a minute without rehearsal. Chunking groups items so that more fits within the limit.
- Re-reading notes is the best revision Re-reading feels productive but builds little lasting memory. The evidence favours retrieval practice — testing yourself — and spacing sessions over days, which flatten Ebbinghaus's forgetting curve.
Practice
Sensory register → short-term memory → long-term memory.
It enters the sensory register and briefly short-term memory, but without attention and rehearsal it decays within seconds and is never encoded into long-term memory.
About 7±2 items (Miller, 1956), lasting around 18–30 seconds without rehearsal.
Chunking: grouping items so each chunk counts as one unit, fitting short-term memory's limited capacity of about 7±2 items.
Quick check
Which of these best defines "rehearsal"?
What did Ebbinghaus's forgetting curve show, and what does it imply for revision?
Give one example each of episodic, semantic and procedural memory.
- The Multi-Store Model: meet Atkinson and Shiffrin's model of how memories flow from the sensory register through short-term to long-term memory.
- Memory moves through stores: Atkinson and Shiffrin's 1968 multi-store model describes information flowing through three stores: the sensory register, which holds fleeting sights and sounds for fractions of a second; short-term memory, which holds about seven items for under half a minute unless rehearsed; and long-term memory, which can store vast amounts for a lifetime.
- encoding: Getting information into memory in the first place, for example by paying attention to a teacher's explanation.
- Watch out for: short-term memory can hold unlimited information