Memory is not one thing but a pipeline of three stores, first mapped by Atkinson & Shiffrin in 1968. Information floods in through the senses, a sliver is held for a moment, an even smaller sliver is worked on, and only the deeply encoded survives for good. Push one item through — attend to it, rehearse it, encode it — and watch at every gate what is kept and what decays.
The three stores
Long-term encoding strength—
The memory systempress a button to send an item through