Describe the components of the mental system, including the sensory register, short-term memory, working memory, and long-term memory

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Information first enters the sensory register, where sights and sounds are represented directly and stored briefly. In the second part of the mind, the short-term memory store, we retain attended-to-information briefly so we can actively "work" on it to reach our goals. One way of looking at the short-term store is in terms of its basic capacity, often referred to as short-term memory: how many pieces of information can be held at once for a few seconds. But most researchers endorse a contemporary view of the short-term store, which offers a more meaningful indicator of its capacity, called working memory—the number of items that can be briefly held in mind while also engaging in some effort to monitor or manipulate those items. Working memory can be thought of as a "mental workspace" that we use to accomplish many activities in daily life.
The sensory register can take in a wide panorama of information. Short-term and working memory are far more restricted, though their capacity increases steadily from early childhood to adulthood. The more effectively we process information in working memory, the more likely it will transfer to the third, and largest, storage area—long-term memory, our permanent knowledge base, which is unlimited. In fact, we store so much in long-term memory that retrieval—getting information back from the system—can be problematic. To aid retrieval, we apply strategies, just as we do in working memory. Information in long-term memory is categorized by its contents, much like a library shelving system that enables us to retrieve items by following the same network of associations used to store them in the first place.