APA Dictionary of Psychology

any theory hypothesizing that information can move through and be retained in any of several memory storage systems, usually of a short-term and a long-term variety. The first to propose a multistore model were U.S. cognitive psychologists Richard C. Atkinson and Richard M. Shiffrin (1942–  ) in 1968 (see information-processing model), with other researchers subsequently proposing their own such models as well. Also called storage-and-transfer model of memory. See dual-store model of memory; modal model of memory.