Evaluation
The multistore model provides a systematic account of the structures and the processes involved in human memory the notion that there are at least two qualitatively different kinds of memory: the short term and the long term memory is supported by free recall studies, the primacy and recency effect and observational examination of brain damaged patients. There’s also evidence supporting the importance of the process of rehearsal in memory. Hender (1979) conducted and experiment regarding rehearsal. He showed that if an experimenter slows down the speed with which he presents the words to participants thus allowing participants to rehearse the words more , we expect to see an increased primacy effect. Since the words earlier on the list would receive more rehearsal and that was verified by his findings. In addition he found that by introducing an interference task the recency effect disappeared. These findings demonstrate the importance of rehearsal.
Critisism
The model proposes that there is a transfer of information form the STM to the LTM, however in everyday life most people devote very little time to the active rehearsal of information even though they are constantly storing new information in their LTM. Therefore, f has been proven that rehearsal may accurately describe what happens when psychologists conduct experiments in labs, but it isn’t necessarily representative of what happens in everyday life. An example of this is what is called incidental learning. If participants are given a list of words and are told that they’ll be asked to recall them they will probably try to memorize them as much as they can by repeating them(rehearsal). However, one can present participants with the same list of words and ask them to process them by counting the number of letters in each word. In that case incidental learning is tested. Hyde & Jenkins (1973) separated participants in two groups: Group A was not informed they would