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Short-term vs Long-term memory - Coggle Diagram
Short-term vs Long-term memory
Short-term memory
Short-term memory (STM) is the point of processing sensory memory. This then determines whether information is moved into long-term memory or not.
STM
Short-term memory is a temporary storage system that processes incoming sensory information.
Short-term memory takes information from sensory memory and sometimes connects that memory to something already in long-term memory.
Short-term memory storage lasts about 20 seconds.
Information processing in STM
Rehearsal is the conscious repetition of information that you want to remember.
This step of rehearsal may help to move information from STM into long-term memory - which is called memory consolidation.
STM capacity
In his research on the capacity of memory, George Miller (1956)0 found that most people can retain about seven items in STM.
Some remember five, some nine, so he called the capacity of STM seven plus or minus two.
Some factors affect our STM. For example, the numbers recall is better than letters, and acoustic coding tends to be better than visual coding.
Summary
Duration - 20 seconds
Capacity - seven +/- two items
Coding - primarily acoustic
Long-term memory
Long-term memory is like the brain's hard-drive. It is theorised to have an unlimited capacity. Most of the time, information can be retained and moved back into short-term memory - but you may need a prompt.
LTM
Long-term memory is the continuous storage of information.
Unlike short-term memory, the storage capacity of LTM has no limits.
LTM contains everything that you can remember, even if it happened 2 minutes ago, weeks ago or years ago.
Strength of long-term memories
Not all long-term memories are remembered equally strongly. It can be harder to remember some memories and prompts (or memory cues) can make it easier to access a memory.
Summary
Duration - unlimited
Capacity - unlimited
Coding - primarily semantic but can be others