Okay, so in this video we're going to be going over short-term memory and working memory, and these are distinct but related ideas. So short-term memory is basically the temporary storage that is going to be holding information for about 15 to 30 seconds approximately, and then working memory is the active manipulation of information that is in short-term memory. So I want you to think about short-term memory as kind of like the box that's actually holding all the information and then working memory is your ability to actively think about and use and manipulate the information that is in that box is kind of the distinction between the two of those. Now both short-term memory and working memory are limited in how much information they can hold and work with at any given time. Now historically this number was believed to be 7 items plus or minus 2, and this came from a very famous study with George Miller in 1965.

You might remember George Miller from chapter 1. He is one of our founders of cognitive psychology. And this finding kind of blew up. It became very, very famous and people kind of confirmed it with biases after the fact. Like, oh yeah, you know, phone numbers are seven numbers, it all makes sense now, and it went unchallenged for many, many years until Cowen and colleagues did a study in 2010 and they found that short-term memory capacity was much closer to 4 items plus or minus 1, and those numbers have been replicated since.

So this seems like a more accurate representation of what short-term memory capacity probably is, but historically we did believe that it was 7 plus or minus 2. Now do keep in mind that this 4 plus or minus 1 is a little bit flexible and we're going to talk about that in our next video, so stick around for that. So for thinking about kind of our little flowchart through our 3 box model, just as a reminder we have incoming sensory input going into sensory memory very briefly for, like, less than a few seconds, and then any information that we pay attention to will go into short-term memory where it will be stored for 15 to 30 seconds, potentially worked with and manipulated using working memory during that time. And then any information that we need to move from short-term to long-term memory will undergo the process of encoding. Okay, so encoding is how we get information from short-term memory to long-term memory.

And then within short-term memory, any information that is not going to get encoded or that you're not actively rehearsing and using over and over is going to get lost, again, pretty quickly. It's only going to be for about 30 seconds. Alright, so that is short-term and working memory, and like I mentioned in our next video we're going to go over the capacity of short-term and working memory in a bit more detail, so I will see you there.