Human information processing

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Definition

  • Human information processing theory deals with how people receive, store, integrate, retrieve, and use information.

See also cognitivism.

A short history

Since the first computers, psychologists have drawn parallels between computers and human thought. The memory model which dominated the 1970’s and 80’s is the three component information processing system of Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968, 1971) insprired by a typicial computer hardware architecture:

  • Sensory Memory : Analogous to input devices such as a keyboard or more sophisticated devices like a voice recognition system
  • Short Term Memory : Analogous to the CPU and it's random-access memory (RAM)
  • Long Term Memory : Analogous to a storage device like a hard disk