title: The mind and brain of short-term memory.
abstract: The past 10 years have brought near-revolutionary changes in psychological theories about short-term memory, with similarly great advances in the neurosciences. Here, we critically examine the major psychological theories (the "mind") of short-term memory and how they relate to evidence about underlying brain mechanisms. We focus on three features that must be addressed by any satisfactory theory of short-term memory. First, we examine the evidence for the architecture of short-term memory, with special attention to questions of capacity and how--or whether--short-term memory can be separated from long-term memory. Second, we ask how the components of that architecture enact processes of encoding, maintenance, and retrieval. Third, we describe the debate over the reason about forgetting from short-term memory, whether interference or decay is the cause. We close with a conceptual model tracing the representation of a single item through a short-term memory task, describing the biological mechanisms that might support psychological processes on a moment-by-moment basis as an item is encoded, maintained over a delay with some forgetting, and ultimately retrieved.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109, USA. jjonides@umich.edu
authors.forename: John
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Jonides
authors.forename: Richard L
authors.initials: RL
authors.lastname: Lewis
authors.forename: Derek Evan
authors.initials: DE
authors.lastname: Nee
authors.forename: Cindy A
authors.initials: CA
authors.lastname: Lustig
authors.forename: Marc G
authors.initials: MG
authors.lastname: Berman
authors.forename: Katherine Sledge
authors.initials: KS
authors.lastname: Moore
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention / Q000502:physiology*; D001921:Brain / Q000033:anatomy & histology; D003071:Cognition / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D008570:Memory, Short-Term / Q000502:physiology*; D009434:Neural Pathways / Q000502:physiology; D011582:Psychological Theory; D011603:Psychophysiology; D012153:Retention, Psychology; D013997:Time Factors