Participants were tasked with recalling word lists with earlier and later words more likely to be recalled and this was known as the ‘primacy’ and ‘recency’ effect. Research evidence by Glanzer et al demonstrated support for short-term and long-term memory being different stores. Retrieval of information from the long-term store occurs through information passing back through the short-term memory store. While encoding for the long-term memory is mainly semantic and based on meaning, the short-term memory encodes acoustically with a capacity of 7 +/- 2 items and a duration of up to 18 seconds. through elaborative or maintenance rehearsal) the information then passes to the long-term memory store (LTM) which has unlimited capacity and unlimited duration dependent on the level of processing of the information received. If rehearsed and processed deep enough (e.g. Rehearsal maintains information in the short-term memory store however it is still vulnerable to being forgotten due to limited duration (decay) or being displaced by new incoming information due to limited capacity (displacement). Information received is raw and unprocessed and the sensory register has a large capacity however the duration of storage is milliseconds unless given focused attention in which case it will move to the short-term memory store. The sensory register is not under cognitive control and is the first storage system for incoming information. The iconic register processes vision, the echoic register process sound and the haptic register process touch. The sensory memory has several stores called sensory registers (SR) with each processing information from a particular sense.

The 3 stores are the sensory memory (SM), the short-term memory (STM) and the long-term memory (LTM). Atkinson & Shiffrin proposed the multi-store memory model which is a structural model composing of 3 separate stores with information passing between stores in a linear way.

In memory note