Psychology 9-1 GCSE - 

2.2.2 - Peterson and Peterson (1959) Short-term retention of individual verbal items:

Aims -

To investigate the duration of short term memory. To test if information that is not rehearsed is lost quickly from short term memory.

Procedure - 

A lab experiment in which 24 participants had to recall meaningless three consonant syllables. They were presented one at a time and had to be recalled after intervals of 3,6,9,12 or 18 seconds. They were also asked to count backwards in three or fours to prevent rehearsal. 

Results - 

There was a rapid increase in forgetting as the time delay increased.

Conclusions - 

Short-term memory has a limited duration of about 18 seconds when rehersal is prevented. If a person is not allowed to rehearse the information will not transfer to their long term memory store.

Strengths - 

• It supports the multistore model of memory (Atkinson and Shiffrin 1969).
• Results are easily proven to be accurate to a degree.

Weaknesses - 

• Lacks mundane realism as they used artificial stimuli.
• Only considered short-term memory duration.
• Only tested on one type of stimuli.