The demise of short-term memory revisited: empirical and computational investigations of recency effects.
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.
Davelaar
Eddy J
EJ
School of Psychology, Birkbeck College, University of London, London WC1E 7HX, England. e.davelaar@bbk.ac.uk
Goshen-Gottstein
Yonatan
Y
Ashkenazi
Amir
A
Haarmann
Henk J
HJ
Usher
Marius
M
D000328:Adult; D003198:Computer Simulation; D036262:Empirical Research; D006801:Humans; D008570:Memory, Short-Term; D011939:Mental Recall; D011584:Psychology / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D013997:Time Factors