Remembering over the short-term: the case against the standard model.
Psychologists often assume that short-term storage is synonymous with activation, a mnemonic property that keeps information in an immediately accessible form. Permanent knowledge is activated, as a result of on-line cognitive processing, and an activity trace is established "in" short-term (or working) memory. Activation is assumed to decay spontaneously with the passage of time, so a refreshing process-rehearsal-is needed to maintain availability. Most of the phenomena of immediate retention, such as capacity limitations and word length effects, are assumed to arise from trade-offs between rehearsal and decay. This "standard model" of how we remember over the short-term still enjoys considerable popularity, although recent research questions most of its main assumptions. In this chapter I review the recent research and identify the empirical and conceptual problems that plague traditional conceptions of short-term memory. Increasingly, researchers are recognizing that short-term retention is cue driven, much like long-term memory, and that neither rehearsal nor decay is likely to explain the particulars of short-term forgetting.
Nairne
James S
JS
Purdue University, Department of Psychological Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana 47907-1364, USA. nairne@psych.purdue.edu
D003463:Cues; D006801:Humans; D008570:Memory, Short-Term / Q000502:physiology*; D011582:Psychological Theory; D012153:Retention, Psychology