“Huh? Can you say that again?”
Do you ever wonder why some things stick in our brains, while others seem to go in one ear and out the other?
Let’s freshen up on the different types of memory and why some things are easier to remember than others.
According to Atkinson and Shiffrin’s Multi-Store Memory Model, there are three main types of memory stores that we possess.
The first type of memory is called sensory memory, which has the shortest duration out of the three types we will talk about. As the name suggests, information coming from the five senses are only held in the sensory memory stores for seconds, or fractions of a second. Examples could be echoic (auditory) such as hearing a bird sing, or iconic (visual), such as seeing the stop sign before you brake.
The second type of memory, which typically lasts 0-18 seconds, is called short-term memory (STM). The main way that STM “sticks” is through rehearsal or mental repetition - for example, you might repeat a new phone number a couple times in order to dial, after which the number is likely forgotten by the time the call is over. If this information is not continually maintained or rehearsed, it will likely be lost from STM and won’t be stored long-term, which brings us to our last type of memory.
Long-term memory (LTM) is the information that stays with us the longest and can be retrieved from our memory when it’s needed. The main reason that LTM sticks around is because it is encoded using elaborative rehearsal, meaning, the information is given meaning. Using elaborative rehearsal is a deeper level of information-processing compared to the repetitive rehearsal used in STM since the link of something that is personally meaningful to new information is most likely to help you remember for months or years to come. For example, if you were trying to memorize theories for your psychology test, you’re more likely to retain the information if you were to create silly acronyms or make up a song, rather than repeating “Atkinson and Shiffirin’s Multi-Store Memory Model” over and over.
References:
Simply Psychology: https://www.simplypsychology.org/multi-store.html
Study.com: https://study.com/learn/lesson/sensory-memory-overview-examples types.html#:~:text=Here%20are%20some%20sensory%20memory,the%20pesto%20on%20a%20pizza.
