What was the procedure of Atkinson & Shiffrin's experiment which led to the creation of the Multi-Store Model?
1 Answer
Glanzer and Cunitz showed that when participants are presented with a list of words, they tend to remember the first few and last few words and are more likely to forget those in the middle of the list, i.e. the serial position effect.
This supports the existence of separate LTM and STM stores because they observed a primacy and recency effect.
Words early on in the list were put into long term memory (primacy effect) because the person has time to rehearse the word, and words from the end went into short term memory (recency effect).
Other compelling evidence to support this distinction between STM and LTM is the case of KF (Shallice & Warrington, 197) who had been in a motorcycle crash where he had sustained brain damage. His LTM seemed to be unaffected but he was only able to recall the last bit of information he had heard in his STM
