Explain the space and time capacities of short-term memory,
the effects of chunking and maintenance rehearsal on these capacities, and the best method for moving information from short-term into long-term memory.
What will be an ideal response?
ANSWER: Answer will include that Psychologist George Miller found that short-term memory was limited to the "magic number" 7 (plus or minus 2) information bits. A bit is a single meaningful "piece" of information, such as a digit. It is as if shortterm memory has 7 "slots" or "bins"into which separate items can be placed. However, other psychologists believe that short-term memory actually holds only four items, unless some chunking has occurred. Chunking, or recoding, is a way to increase the space capacity of STM. Information chunks are made up of bits of information grouped into larger units. Chunking recodes (reorganizes) information into units that are already in LTM, such as the individual letters of "T V I B M Y M C A" could be grouped into three familiar chunks of "TV," "IBM," and "YMCA." We are consciously aware of short-term memories for only a dozen seconds or so. Unless you use maintenance rehearsal (silently say it over and over to yourself), information is quickly "dumped" from STM and forever lost. This prevents our minds from storing useless names, dates, telephone numbers, and other trivia. This maintenance rehearsal can prolong information in short-term memory with the more times it is repeated the better chance the information is to be remembered (rote learning). However, to move this information into long-term memory and maintain this information longer, one should link this new information with memories that are already in long-term memory, a process known as elaborative processing. Thus, elaborative processing would be more effective when studying than learning through rote rehearsal.
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