Baddely and Hitch believed that the STM store in the Multistore Model was too simplistic: they thought that short term memory was not a passive store, but several active processes that manipulate information.

New research, relevant to the cognitive Psychology section of the A2 specification, shows that mental imagery can influence perception.

Sigmund Freud suggested that traumatic events are forgotten because they are hidden from our conscious awareness, or repressed; Brown and Kulik (1977) found that highly emotional events, such as the assassination of John F. Kennedy are often vividly remembered (although this has been widely disputed); now, research published in the Journal of Consumer Research suggests that people tend to underestimate the intensity of the actual emotions if they are mixed, rather than happy or sad.