Short Term Memory Psychology

Short-term memory is a broad topic that has been studied by many psychologists for many years to discover the factors of cognition. Many past studies have concluded that short term memory is very limited and can only hold up to just a few seconds of information. In order to retain information for a longer period of time, many techniques such as repeating information, can possibly be converted into long term memory. The purpose of current study is to determine which gender can score higher on a short term memory assessment when placed under a time constraint. This experiment was designed after a research done by George A. Miller. He was the founder of cognitive psychology; who discovered that people are able to memorize seven numbers plus or

Konkle, Brady, and Alvarez (2010), conducted a study based on visual long-term memory, whereas participants had to memorize as many sets of pictures as possible. As a result, participants scored 82% on test results, even after spending many hours looking at 2,800 different objects (Konkle, Brady, & Alvarez, 2010). Since most of these images consisted of everyday life, people were able to memorize these images without a problem. For example, there were images such as different types of cellphones, foods, animals, clocks, and much more. Participants recognized these images from previous experience which made it easier to memorize since it has been stored in there memory for a very long time. Difference between long-term memory and short-term memory is that with long-term memory a person can store information for a longer period of time. In addition, recent studies have shown that information stored in a memory for a long period of time, can become very limited as aging goes by. Many studies demonstrated that as people get older, long-term memory becomes less accurate to the point when remembering things such as visually and verbally becomes highly difficult for them. Not everyone has the same type of memory retention than others. Declines in verbal and visual ability were found to be significant between older adults (Pauls, Petermann, & Lepach,

As presented in past research, as people age, memory can become difficult when trying to recall certain things from the past or present. Everyone has different amounts of capacity and different ways of memorizing everything on a daily basis. Furthermore, short-memory can then become into long-term memory if something was presented again to that person in a later future. Two ways to memorizing information such as numbers, could possibly be done by either rehearsing or chunking the digits. Chunking digits has been done for many years by many participants that were part in digit span studies according to many researchers. In addition, short-term memory is very limited and can hold only certain amount information which can actually turn into long-term memory eventually.

Method
Participants
A convenience sample of 40 participants (20 women, 20 men) was used as part of this study. These participants varied from the ages 18-45, in which Group 1 had an average of (M= ###) and Group 2 had an average of (M= ##). Demographics were just based on age, sex, and ethnicity. Participants were tested in two different groups in which there were 20 subjects in each group. Ten females and ten males participated in one group and the other ten males and ten females were put into the second groups.