Question

study by George Miller on short term memory.please answer the following questions:

1. What is Miller's hypotheses regarding short term memory?

2.Do you think Miller was accurate in his prediction of the size of short term memory? Why or why not?

3. Describe a study of your own design to test the limits (size) of short term memory.

Answer 1

1) Short term memory is the working memory or the immediate memory used for storing different information in regions of brain. This information is the recent knowledge about different events which has taken place in the recent past. Miller proposed in 1957 that the capacity of information can be stored in the regions of brain in the form of maximum seven units of information. It is based on different factors like time of storage of information and interference and similarity between different amounts of information which can be stored in the brain regions. It is not based on the capacity of storing information as explained by Baddeley and Hitch in 1974. There are 7 items, words or digits which can be repeated and stored in the brain memory regions. There are 7 different categories of articles, words or items which can be interpreted and analyzed simultaneously in the brain regions. Different words or letters can be broken up in different sets of 7 groups for effectively remembering the different sources of information for memorizing and understanding. Memory is inversely related to the word length for storing information. As the number of syllables increased in the words the retention of different words in memory decreased leading to less memorization of different words. Experimentation was performed on retention of long and short words in the memory.

2) In Miller experiments for testing the hypothesis the recency effect in free call was used as a method of understanding the retention of different items and information in the brain. There should not be availability of different amounts of independent information in the brain. The capacity of memory is constant if a determined amount of information is available for processing the information in the brain with bits of information stored in the form of letters of words. There is study of memory span which is used for studying the phenomenon of recency effect in free call response in the brain regions. The prediction of Miller was accurate and were without any form of controversy.

3)There are various experiments which can be designed for understanding the Miller analysis of short term memory in the brain. It involves the study of the number of phonemes and syllables in words which can be memorized to different extents in the brain. If the word limit is kept constant then the words of short term duration are recalled to a better extent than remembering the words of long term duration. There is a time limit in which different amounts of words can be specifically retained for analyzing the bits of information in the brain.Different sets of words were analyzed for retention among people having different kinds of syllables used for analyzing the information in the brain. One set of experimental words composed of eight monosyllables as compared to set of eight five syllable words for analyzing their retention in the memory and brain.The correctness and recollection of words in the memory was analyzed as a measure of the word length limit which can be stored in the brain. The sequence correctness and retention of words was more in the words belonging to the monosyllable category as compared to the five syllables category of words. The words with short names and shorter word length were effectively remembered as compared to words to longer word lengths. Memory score reading rate and memory score articulation rate was effectively understood and analyzed in detail. This the study of the experimental design which is effective for understanding the memorization of different words containing different amounts of syllables.