Clive Wearing was a highly educated, highly talented musician and broadcaster who

a

infection know as encephalitis. This caused major memory disruption. He's still able to talk, read and

and can even (still) sight read music and play quite

piano pieces yet his memory is dramatically impaired; he has no recollection of his

. Clive Wearings case study demonstrates that memory is crucial for our well being and

living. It also shows that our memory is quite a complex part of human

.

In spite of huge

in his memory for personal

and general knowledge, Clive it still able to walk,

, play music and read and

Which suggests that our memory is not a

system.

He cannot use his

to

his future.

The duration of the short term memory ranges from

to

seconds. These are encoded

and the short term memory can only hold

+- chunks of information.

It’s been proven that the

memory can only hold a few items at one time and that it’s

is brief. It’s a temporary store and anything we need to remember for longer needs to be

into the long term store. The

peterson effect comes into place here. This is where participants were then given a distractor

, or an event meant to focus their attention elsewhere so they didn't remember the

using strategies like mental rehearsal.

A study devised in order to support the existence of limited

of the short term memory was done by

and

1959. In this study, participants were shown

for a brief amount of time to remember for one minute. They were then asked to count

in 3’s from a specified number to prevent them from

the words. After, in intervals of 3, 6, 9,

, 15 and

seconds, participants were asked to recall the original

. This was repeated several times with

trigrams.

After 3 seconds,

% of the trigrams were able to recalled however progressively, as the time

lengthened, the number of trigrams that were recalled

. After

seconds, less than 10% of the trigrams were recalled

.

Short-term memory has a limited duration when

is prevented. It is thought that this information is lost from short-term memory from trace

. The results of the study also show the short-term memory is different from long-term memory in terms of

. Thus supporting the

-

model of memory.

The

term memory if the first

that may influence

the amount of information that you can store in the short term memory. An example of this is

and

study which took place in 1969. The result they found from the study is that when

strings are repeated with in a series of immediate memory span trials, it

becomes easier for people to

them. This proves that when information is stored in the long term memory, it

increases the capacity of the short term memory. Reading

can also affect the capacity because when the information is read

, performance can drop in comparison to reading them

. Also, the fact that numbers can be grouped together

(e.g. with phone numbers) can also affect the performance of a task in a

way- we cluster the numbers rather than remembering them in

string. Lastly, the pronunciation time has been proven to be a

piece of research into the capacity of the short term memory than millers

span; Schweikert and Boruff 1986 tested this using a number of different

(e.g. numbers, colours and shapes) and in Arbic languages for example it may take

to pronounce the colour red therefore, if in a sequence it may be

for them to remember this word because it takes longer to

;people could consistently remember words that took 1.5-2 seconds to pronounce.

rehearsal can affect the duration of the short term memory. As learnt from the

Peterson effect, items disappear from the short term memory only when rehearsal is

and new items can only

their place in the short term memory if older information is lost through decay/

or is transferred to the long term memory through

. When we deliberately intend to

information as well can affect how long we mean to hold information in the

term memory as well. Information from the short term memory can vanish in a matter of a few

if people don’t pay attention to them or make a

effort to

it. In correlation to this, the

of information that needs to be retained also can affect the

of the short term memory. If it can be

because they have some sort of

to them then the number of chunks to be remembered instead of the numbers of the

makes it easier.