The mind and brain of short-term memory.
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.
Jonides
John
J
Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109, USA. jjonides@umich.edu
Lewis
Richard L
RL
Nee
Derek Evan
DE
Lustig
Cindy A
CA
Berman
Marc G
MG
Moore
Katherine Sledge
KS
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