Psychological and Neural Mechanisms of Short-term Memory Cindy A. Lustig Richard L. Lewis Marc G. Berman (original) (raw)
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In the single-store model of memory, the enhanced recall for the last items in a free-recall task (i.e., the recency effect) is understood to reflect a general property of memory rather than a separate short-term store. This interpretation is supported by the finding of a long-term recency effect under conditions that eliminate the contribution from the short-term store. In this article, evidence is reviewed showing that recency effects in the short and long terms have different properties, and it is suggested that 2 memory components are needed to account for the recency effects: an episodic contextual system with changing context and an activation-based short-term memory buffer that drives the encoding of item–context associations. A neurocomputational model based on these 2 components is shown to account for previously observed dissociations and to make novel predictions, which are confirmed in a set of experiments. In recent years, the memory literature has seen an increased int...
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Following Ebbinghaus (1885/1964), a number of procedures have been devised to measure short-term memory using immediate serial recall: digit span, cube imitation test and Corsi's (1972) blocks task. Understanding the cognitive processes involved in these tasks was obstructed initially by the lack of a coherent concept of short-term memory and later by the mistaken assumption that short-term and long-term memory reflected distinct processes as well as different kinds of experimental task. Despite its apparent conceptual simplicity, a variety of cognitive mechanisms are responsible for short-term memory, and contemporary theories of working memory have helped to clarify these. Contrary to the earliest writings on the subject, measures of short-term memory do not provide a simple measure of mental capacity, but they do provide a way of understanding some of the key mechanisms underlying human cognition.