ABSTRACT
Remembering something—say, your e-mail box password—implies retrieving information that was previously encoded and stored. Memory is not only the process of storing information, it encompasses these three steps: encoding, storage, and retrieval. A popular architectural model of memory in psychology, called the multistore model (Atkinson and Shiffrin 1968), suggests that human memory has three components: sensory stores, short-term store, and long-term store (see Figure 4.1). Before I describe each of these stores, or memory types, keep in mind that they are functional components (as opposed to physical brain areas) and that, as always with the brain, memory is more complex than this simple breakdown; the components are not necessarily independent from one another, nor are they necessarily separated in a clear-cut way. Information processing does not necessarily go from sensory to short-term to long-term memory in this serial order. Many researchers have challenged and refined this model since it was first outlined; yet it is good enough for the purposes of this book. The only nuance I will mention when describing the model concerns the short-term memory because it was later replaced by the concept of working memory, which is a more relevant concept when considering video games.36
