What is the Multi-Store Model of Memory?

Last time, we saw that Atkinson and Shiffrin developed a memory model called the multi-store model to explain how we transfer information across memory stores.

And, their multi-store model said that we have three memory stores…

Their multi-store model said that we have three memory stores:

The sensory register, the short-term memory store, and the long-term memory store.

But, how did Atkinson and Shiffrin explain transfer of information from one store to the next?

Well, first, ~~~ Atkinson and Shiffrin said that information could only travel through the stores in one direction…

Information always passes through the sensory register first, followed by the short-term memory store, and finally, into the long-term memory store.

And, according to the multi-store model, information also can’t bypass going through one of the the stores….

To get to the short-term memory store, information first has to go through the sensory register…

To get to the long-term memory store, information first has to pass through the sensory register, followed by the short-term memory store.

Now, to describe the flow of information across the stores, Atkinson and Shiffrin said that the flow of information was unidirectional – from the Latin word “uni”, meaning one…

First, for information to pass from the sensory register to the short-term memory store, they said that we have to pay attention to it.

For example, suppose Kiyam is driving across London, taking in the sights around him using his sensory register… 

Some of the information that he takes in isn’t very interesting…

For instance, he doesn’t really care about the colours of the other cars on the road..

So, he doesn’t pay attention to that information, and it leaves his sensory register without being transferred to his short-term memory…

But, when he hears that there’s been a big car accident on the motorway, he pays attention, and this information is transferred to his short-term memory…

In fact, the news is so interesting that he wants to tell his family about it when he gets home in half an hour’s time…

Now, to transfer information from short-term memory into long-term memory, Atkinson and Shiffrin said that we have to repeat the information, either out loud, or in our heads, and think about it again, and again…

And we call these actions, rehearsal.

So, to transfer the information about the car accident to long-term memory, Kiyam has to rehearse it, running through the details of the news story again and again…

To sum up, we’ve now seen how information is transferred across the memory stores according to the multi-store model…

According to the multi-store model of memory, information is unidirectional and flows from the sensory register to the short-term and long-term memory store.

For information to be transferred from the sensory register to the short-term memory store, we need to pay attention to it.

And for information to be transferred from the short-term memory store to the long-term memory store we have to rehearse it.