Recent+Research

=Recent Research=

There has been a lot of research done on STM and how it works. fMRI has allowed regions of the brain associated with STM to be discovered. It is important to note however that those areas are not just associated with STM, as the hippocampus for example has been associated with LTM.

Alvarez & Cavanagh (2008)
Alvarez & Cavanagh in 2008 came up with the theory that boundary features of objects are easier to encode for in our STM as opposed to surface features. They propose that the more levels of encoding, the harder it is for it to be remembered in our STM. A boundary feature only has 1 level of encoding whereas a surface feature has 2 levels. A limitation of this study however is that it only applies to grayscale objects, if the object had a colour then this colour might turn into a boundary feature and offer another level of encoding. This finding is summarised in the picture below.



Galster //et al//. (2009)
Galster //et al//. (2009) performed experiments where using different generated faces to show that the familiarity of the face to a person enables it for easy recognition. They also highlighted the prospect of the emotion the face was displaying in causing a higher recall rate.