What is the brown-Peterson task?

Answer 1

Aim: To investigate the duration of short-term memory, and provide empirical evidence for the multi-store model.

Procedure: A lab experiment was conducted. Participants had to recall trigrams (three letters, eg. TGH). To prevent rehersal participants were asked to count backwards in threes from a specified number. This is known as the brown Peterson technique.

Participants were asked to recall the trigram after intervals of either 3, 6, 9, 12, 15 or 18 seconds.

Findings: The longer the interval delay the less trigrams were recalled. Participants were able to recall 80% of trigrams after a 3 seconds delay. However, after 18 seconds less than 10% of trigrams were recalled correctly.

Conclusion: Short-term memory has a limited duraction when rehersal is prevented. It is thought that this information is lost from short-term memory from trace decay. The results of the study also show the short-term memory is different from long-term memory in terms of duration. Thus supporting the multi-store model of memory.

Criticisms: This experiment has low ecological validity as people do not try to recall trigrams in real life.

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