Various external and internal influential factors on short-term memory

Abstract

In modern society, people from all walks of life depend on their memories to live, sharing some memorable experiences with their new friends and remembering what they have recently experienced to acquire new knowledge and skills. It is not difficult to discover that memory plays an essential role in people’s daily lives. This is why many researchers and scholars are making attempts to discover more about memory, which is classified into four different categories: sensory memory (SM), short-term memory (STM), long-term memory (LTM), and working memory (WM). This article aims at the study of STM, presenting some internal and external factors that may affect the function of STM. Internal elements include sleeping, the aging process, and stress, and at the same time, externally, STM is related to personal living conditions (pollution and high altitude) and some designed activities (multitasking, sensory integration, and chunking). This article shows that some factors enhance STM, while some factors harms STM, either internal or external. In the future, the study of influential factors on STM will help people maintain good STM, increase their memory ability, and give warnings to people when they are in danger of being harmed by some factors.