Arizona Educator Proficiency Assessments (AEPA) Practice Exam 2025 – Your All-in-One Guide to Exam Mastery!

According to cognitive information processing theory, individuals initially receive input from the environment through sensory memory. Sensory memory acts as a brief storage system that captures all sensory information from the environment, such as sights, sounds, and smells, for a very short duration—typically milliseconds to a few seconds. This mechanism allows individuals to hold onto large volumes of sensory data before deciding which pieces of that information are worthy of further processing.

Once the sensory input is registered in sensory memory, only a fraction of it moves on to short-term (or working) memory, where it can be actively manipulated and processed. Long-term memory, on the other hand, serves as a more permanent storage system for information that has been encoded and consolidated over time. Thus, sensory memory is the correct answer, as it is the first stage in the cognitive processing of environmental input.