Atkinson Shiffrin Memory Model

There are always a greater number of psychologists being interested on how the information is stored and retrieved from the memory system. The early experimental psychologists such as William James and Wilhelm Wundt were used their introspections to generated their idea. They had divided the memory system into short-term and long-term components before the turn of the century. Furthermore, they had differentiated the variety between the thoughts currently present in the consciousness and those could be leads to consciousness.

However, the perception about short-term versus long-term memory was abandon after the psychology turned into behaviorism which emphasized animal as opposed to human research. But during the 1950's, there are numeral number of psychologists from different countries reintroduced this memory system, such as Donald Broadbent, Donald Hebb and George Miller. The concurrent development of the computer models of behavior and mathematical psychology leads to the rapid growth of this two process system. Thus, large research effort have put into this two process system since the viewpoint of short-term and long-term memory is undergoing considerable theoretical development nowadays.

2.1 An outline of memory system

The best described about the overall memory system is the information flow into or out of short-term store (STS) and the subject control of this flow. All phase of memory is assumed to consist of small unit pieces of information which is associative related. "Image" or "trace" is closely related between any set of information whereby it is not necessary a visual representation. For example, the image store might include the sound of various symbols, the semantic codes and other units of information.

Figure 2 Process of multi-store model

Based on Figure 2, we can see that our sensory which is register in various sensory modalities will process the accepted information from environment and then enter into STS. Under the control of the subject, the information will stay inside the STS for a period of time. The item can be keep inside the STS by rehearsal them for once or many times but the number can be maintain is strictly limited. The image cannot be recovers from STS once it is lost from STS. The information might copy into long-term store (LTS) from STS during this period. Thus, there are a vice versa direction for the information copied among STS and LTS.

However, the information transmission from STS to LTS is highly dependent on the rehearsal process in STS. If let say certain information in the LTS is closely associated with the image that stay inside the STS, those image will enter into the STS as well. Thus, the information entering the STS from sensory register will be specific to the modality of input. The two store of system do not involve different physiological structures or locate in