Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Metacognition
Attention
Stimuli
Encoding
Retrieval
Perception
Fig. 5.1
A model of human memory
Memory Stores
Memory stores are repositories that hold information, in some cases in a raw state
and in others in organized, meaningful form. They are
sensory memory
,
working
memory
, and
long-term memory.
Sensory Memory
Hold your finger in front of you and rapidly wiggle it. Do you see a faint “shadow”
that trails behind your finger as it moves. This shadow is the image of your finger
that has been briefly stored in your visual sensory memory. Likewise, when someone
says, “That's an oxymoron,” you retain “Ox see moron” in your auditory sensory
memory, even if it has no meaning for you.
Sensory memory
is the store that briefly holds incoming stimuli from the envi-
ronment until they can be processed (Neisser, 1967). Sensory memory is nearly
unlimited in capacity, but if processing does not begin almost immediately, the mem-
ory trace quickly fades away. Sensory memory is estimated to retain information for
about 1 s for vision and 2-4 s for hearing (Pashler & Carrier, 1996).
Sensory memory is the beginning point for further processing. In reading, for
example, it would be impossible to get meaning from a sentence if the words at the
beginning were lost from your visual sensory memory before you got to the end.
It holds the information until you attach meaning to it and transfer it to working
memory, the next store.
Working Memory
Working memory is the store that holds information as you process and try to make
sense of it. It is the workbench of our minds where “conscious” thinking occurs
(Paas, Renkl, & Sweller, 2004), and it is where we construct our knowledge. We are
