Alright, so sensory memory is going to be that stage of storage that's dealing with incoming sensory input. So this could be visual information, auditory, olfactory, taste, etcetera. Information is usually held in sensory memory in this little box for a very, very short amount of time. On average, it's going to be retained for less than a few seconds. And we do see that different sensory modalities tend to be retained for different amounts of time. For example, visual stimuli tend to be retained for about half a second; it's very, very brief.

Auditory stimuli tend to be retained the longest. Humans will often retain auditory stimuli for less than 10 seconds. So we tend to, on average, retain auditory stimuli the longest, but that is just an average. So what is happening here is that we have our incoming sensory input, again that can be from any sensory modality, and that is entering sensory memory where on average it's going to hang out for less than a few seconds. The way that we are going to move information from sensory memory into short-term memory is just by paying attention to it.

So if you are attending to or noticing that information, it's going to get sent into short-term memory. If you are not attending to or noticing that information, it's going to get lost, basically immediately. Okay? And this is actually a really important feature of the human brain because think about how much sensory information is coming into you at any given moment. Right?

The feeling of your clothing, the ticking of a clock, the temperature of the room that you're in, and the smell of the room that you're in. If you are aware of all of those things every second of every day, that would be really overwhelming. Right? And it would take up a ton of cognitive processing space, and we don't really want that. Right?

So by basically forgetting most of this information immediately, we're actually kind of opening up space and reducing cognitive load. Alright? So any information that we are paying attention to is going to go into short-term memory, and we will be talking about short-term memory in our next video. So I will see you there.