Sensory memory holds a lot of info but only for a very short time.

Info must be focused on to reach STM. We call this selective attention.

Example: Imagine you're at a music concert. There are lots of sounds, lights, and people, but you can focus on the lyrics of the song playing.

Info going from sensory memory to STM passes through schemas, our mental frameworks. This can distort or filter out info.

Example: If you've always thought cats are aloof, you might not notice a friendly cat at a friend's house.

Asymmetric Dominance

This happens when a third, inferior option (the decoy) makes one of the initial options seem more desirable.

Example: You're choosing between two phones, Phone A and Phone B. Then a third phone, Phone C, is introduced, which is worse than Phone B but not Phone A. Even if no one chooses Phone C, its presence makes Phone B more desirable.

An experiment by Huber, Payne, and Puto (1982) confirmed this theory.