Cognitive psychologists believe that the multi-store model of memory is a way of showing that the way in which we think and process information is done in the manner of a computer. In addition to this, Cognitive psychology has been influenced by developments in computer science and so analogies are often made between how a computer works and how we process information. Based on this computer analogy cognitive psychology is interested in how the brain inputs, stores and outputs information. There are five main stages for this process…
The first stage, known as input, and this is the process of data entering the memory from the environment. In computer terms, this is the same as typing something into a keyboard or instead clicking the mouse. For humans whatever is being in-putted will come through the senses; for example, the data most likely coming through the brain would be visually so it therefore comes through the eyes.
The second stage is known as encoding and this involves putting data into a format in order to understand and recognise the information. In computer terms, most data is encoded into what is known as binary codes so when we type the letter ‘Q’ onto a keyboard it is represented in the system as 01010001. Whereas in human terms, we can only represent the data into a format in which that we can understand and one that the mind can cope with. A good example to support this would be when a person were to look at a monument such as the empire estate building in New York they would have to represent it as 2D if we wanted to remember it so we are scaling it down. So when visual data has been turned into an image it has indeed been encoded, much like in the way images are a reflection of what we and our minds see, so then the echoes we hear are reflections of our hearing and these echoes are what we use to encode sound into memory.
Thirdly there is storage which follows encoding, and this is how...