Memory is not one thing. It is a pipeline of three stores, first mapped by Atkinson and Shiffrin in 1968. A flood of information comes in through the senses. A small slice is held for a moment. A smaller slice is worked on. Only what is encoded well lasts. Push one item through. Attend to it, work on it, and encode it. At each gate, watch what is kept and what fades.
The three stores
Encoding strength (line = enough to store)-
The memory systempress a button to send an item through