Short-term retention of individual verbal items.

Abstract

The 9 lives of short-term memory. In A. Thorn & M. Page (Eds.), Interactions between short-term and long-term memory in the verbal domain (pp. 16 -43). Hove, UK: Psychology Press.

Assessing the distinguishability of models and the informativeness of data

“…Empirical data that fall close to the criterion are fit equally well by both models. Figure 5 displays the HY/SE landscapes for Wixted and Ebbeson's (1991) design on the left, and Peterson and Peterson's (1959) design on the right, with the empirical data (indicated by circles and triangles) overplotted. Despite the similarity between the landscapes, the empirical data behave rather differently to one another.…”

“…The data on the left are from Wixted and Ebbeson (1991). The data on the right are from Peterson and Peterson (1959).…”

Aspects of the Search for Neural Mechanisms of Memory

“…Consider, for example, some very different attempts to state the duration of STM. Early investigators of human STM (Brown 1958, Peterson & Peterson 1959 reported that it lasts only about 30 sec if rehearsal is prevented. Agranoff et al (1966) reported that in goldfish, if formation of LTM is prevented by an inhibitor of protein synthesis, STM can last up to 3 days, although normally LTM forms within an hour after training.…”

Postacquisition unexpected footshock disrupts appetitively motivated instrumental performance based on short-term retention

“…Blanchard and Honig (1976), Grant, Brewster, and Stierhoff (1983), Kamin (1969), Maki (1979), and Terry and Wagner (1975) have all reported that surprising events are better remembered than expected events, presumably reflecting more extensive processing. Moreover, numerous students of human cognition (e.g., Brown, 1958;Peterson & Peterson, 1959) have argued that one event will interfere with the processing of another to the degree that the former strains the (presumably) limited processing capacity of the organism. Integrating the notion that surprise enhances processing with the view that retention can be impaired by a nontarget event that overloads a limited processing capacity, Kremer (1979) and Wagner, Rudy, and Whitlow (1973) demonstrated that an unexpected, salient intervening nontarget US presentation interfered with manifest retention of a temporally proximal target CS-US pairing more than did an otherwise comparable expected intervening event.…”