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Name: Saad Mazhar Qureshi
ID: SP12-BB-0056
Course: Introduction to Psychology
Section: B
Article on: Short Term Memory
Submitted to: Ma’am Zaib un Nisa

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Short-term memory, also known as primary or active memory,
includes the information we are currently aware of or thinking
about. Most of the information kept in short-term memory will
be stored for approximately 20 to 30 seconds, but it can be
even less if rehearsal or active maintenance of the information
is prevented. The capacity of short-term memory can vary, but
recent research suggests that people are capable of storing
approximately four chunks or pieces of information in short-
term memory.
Short term memory is part of the memory storage system
which is capable of storing material for a brief period of time
and to some extent it determines how well the rest of your
intelligences are utilized. At any one time short term memory
can contain seven, plus or minus two, "chunks" of information.
If short term memory tries to acquire more items than it can
handle, the middle items will often be displaced. Items remain
in short term memory around twenty seconds. Substantial
evidence exists to support a general dependency of reasoning
upon short term memory capacity. The longer information is
stored in short term memory the easier it is to manipulate
information needed in the execution of complex cognitive tasks
(e.g. short term memory has been shown to be correlated with
problem solving, learning, reasoning, and reading
comprehension).

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It is closely related to "working memory"—is like a receptionist
for the brain. As one of two main memory types, short-term
memory is responsible for storing information temporarily and
determining if it will be dismissed or transferred on to long-
term memory. Although it sounds complicated, this process
takes your short-term memory less than a minute to complete.
For example, it is helping you right now by storing information
from the beginning of this sentence, so that you can make
sense of the end of it. More recently, scientists have begun to
dive a little deeper into "short-term" brain functions and have
added a separate (but similar) type of memory,” working"
memory.
Case Study :
Its capacity is also very limited: George A. Miller (1956), when
working at Bell Laboratories, conducted experiments showing
that the store of short-term memory was 7±2 items (the title of
his famous paper, "The magical number 7±2"). Modern
estimates of the capacity of short-term memory are lower,
typically of the order of 4–5 items; however, memory capacity
can be increased through a process called chunking. For
example, in recalling a ten-digit telephone number, a person
could chunk the digits into three groups: first, the area code
(such as 123), then a three-digit chunk (456) and lastly a four-
digit chunk (7890). This method of remembering telephone

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numbers is far more effective than attempting to remember a
string of 10 digits; this is because we are able to chunk the
information into meaningful groups of numbers. This may be
reflected in some countries in the tendency to display
telephone numbers as several chunks of three numbers, with
the final four-number group generally broken down into two
groups of two.
When reading a list the first and last items are remembered
better than middle words. The two memory processes that
cause this to happen are called the primacy and recency
effects. Try to schedule frequent short breaks as this will create
more primacy/recency peaks helping you to remember more
information. The longer you study the bigger the dip in recall
between the primacy and recency effects.