Eyewitness Testimony and Memory

There are generally three types of memory: sensory memory, short-term memory and long-term memory.
In sensory memory, the sensory memories act as buffers for stimuli received through the senses. A sensory memory exists for each sensory channel: iconic memory for visual stimuli, echoic memory for acoustic stimuli and haptic memory for touch. Information is passed from sensory memory into short-term memory by attention, thereby filtering the stimuli to only those, which are of interest at a given time.
Short-term memory acts as a scratch pad for temporary recall of the information under process. For instance, in order to understand this sentence you need to hold in your mind the beginning of the sentence you read the rest. Short-term memory decays rapidly and also has a limited capacity. Chunking of information can lead to an increase in the short-term memory capacity. This is the reason why a hyphenated phone number is easier to remember than a single long number. The successful ...