Reaction time as an index of rehearsal in short-term memory.

The Demonstration of Short-Term Consolidation

“…The asymptotic RT in the 3-letter condition was about 21 ms longer than that for the 1-letter condition. This result was expected based on several previous reports that holding a memory load causes some slowing of response times in concurrent speeded tasks and that a larger load is associated with more slowing (Logan, 1978; see also Shulman, Greenberg, & Martin, 1971;Stanners, Meunier, & Headley, 1969).…”

“…That is, the limitations that we demonstrated in Experiments 1-7 were not caused by limitations in the capacity of durable storage. Stanners, Meunier, and Headley (1969) performed an experiment that bears some surface similarity to ours. They required subjects to encode information presented visually.…”

Memory and processing limits in decision-making.

“…Consistent with the other studies, secondary task RT was found to be longer early than late in the retention interval (Stanners, Meunier, & Headley, 1969).…”

Processing demands during mental operations

“…With one exception (Trumbo & Milone, Experiment 11, 1971), aseries of studies employingboth tracking (Johnston et al, Experiment 11, 1970;Trumbo & Milone, Experiment I, 1971) and a variety of discrete secondary tasks Shulman, Greenberg, & Martin, 1971;Stanners, Meunier, & Headley, 1969) showed processing demands during retention and rehearsal. The rehearsal stage follows the presentation of items such as words, a trigram, or a light sequence and precedes a manual or verbal recall stage.…”

“…The degree of processing required for rehearsing a list of letters or words is affected by list length, with higher processing demands for long than short lists Johnston et al, 1970), and by item difficulty, with higher processing demands for more difficult items (Stanners et al, 1969). In addition, the degree of interference with the secondary task decreases across the length of the retention period Stanners et al, 1969). This reduction in processing demands over rehearsal time may reflect a decreased rehearsal load as items are learnedand stored in long-term memory.…”