by Luka Honeywell
The mock exam will be published on canvas today.
As one may know, memory is the term we use to describe the way that human retain information. We have three types of memory:
This type of memory briefly stores the information from you senses. Maybe remembering a face you saw 5 minutes ago is a form of this. We would call this Iconic memory. There are two different modalities that are stored in sensory memory.
As previously heard Iconic memory which equates to the visual sensory and Echoic memory which links to the auditory sensory.
George Sperling was the one who first studied iconic memory which is a sub memory of sensory memory. This was done by showing subject an array of letters very briefly. To mix things up they added things like high tones or other stimuli to throw people off. However this actually worked against them, the high tone somehow made it easier for people to remember the array of letters.
This actually later showed that our sensory memory had a very high capacity, in fact it is essentially unlimited. However our capacity is very large, the duration of those memories is the opposite. These memories quickly leave us and are either masked or replaced by another
This is also known as Short-term memory. I am sure everyone has atleast heard of short term memory, it is not there for very long and doesn't have a very large capacity, however it has a longer duration compared to the sensory memory.
We can however increase our capacity in way of chunking. Chunking is a technique that one can practice. By affiliating things to the thing you have to memorize one can actually increase the capacity of their short term memory.