Velma Owens
Psychology Individual Project
Unit 4

Our memory capability is basically divided into three major parts according to a model that was developed in 1968 by Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin. The three main parts of our memory is sensory, short-term, and long-term memory. Sensory memory is the main storage area for our memory bank. It is the brief processing center that gets all the reading from our five senses. Each sense makes its own sensory memory. Some of the sensory memories will go to the short-term file and what does not go there will be lost in a matter of a second or two. One example of sensory memory is lighting followed by a loud clap of thunder, these are processed by two different senses-the lighting is sight whereas the thunder was hearing. What goes on to our short-term is put in there by some awareness of our sensory stimuli that have some meaning to us. The next one is our short-term memory. This works between sensory and long-term memories. While in here the memory will only last about 15 to 25 seconds if it is not passed on to the long-term. There are several concerns in this area of our memory. Such as to how long we can hold information in our short-term bank but also how much we can hold in any memory bank because our storage is very limited, in which determines how much we can recall on the spot. According to Klaus Oberaver we only remember things in groups of seven. If we rearrange the groups to what is called chunking we can still only remember seven at a time but each chunk contains more information within itself. An example of this is the alphabet; ABC def ghi jkl mno pqr stu each group contains three letters but there are seven groups. The last and finial stage is long-term memory. To get information stored in these boxes you have to repeat thing over and over or/and associate them