Abstract: In two experiments on the effects of modality on memory span for words, conventional measures of span were supplemented by analyses of serial position curves and by analyses of the principal auditory features of intrusion errors. Auditory presentation led not only to better recall of the terminal words in each stimulus list but also to better recall of word order given correct item recall. Intrusion errors were found to share a number of auditory features with the corresponding omissions, even when the lists had been presented visually. The most salient or the best-retained word features were the syllabic stress pattern and the identity of the stressed vowel phoneme. The data provide evidence for a partial retention of auditory features of stimulus words in short-term memory tasks and are taken to support attribute rather than unit models of short-term memory.

Abstract: Two groups of subjects who differed in physical fitness (24 well-trained and 24 less well-trained male students) participated in an experiment concerned with mental performance during and after physical work. The physical work was matched between the groups in terms of the percentage of maximal work capacity. Three mental tasks were used: task I involved high information load, placing great demands on continuous concentration and switching of attention as well as on short-term memory; task 2 involved paired associate learning with recall following short and long retention delays; task 3 was a multiplication task with great demands on concentration and on short-term memory. Tasks 1 and 2 were performed during the four different work-load conditions and task 3 after the physical work. As expected, heart rate during physical work was about the same in both groups. No intergroup difference was found in mental performance during physical work. However, recovery rate in terms of heart rate was faster, and menta...

Abstract: The majority of researchers investigating the memory skills of retarded individuals have utilized heterogeneous samples of subjects whose sole criteria for grouping was either IQ or MA. The present experiment was designed to evaluate the short-term memory performance of subjects representing a specific type of retardation. Three groups of subjects (Down syndrome, CA control, and MA control) received a battery of tests designed to assess recall and recognition memory utilizing either auditory or visual input with verbal and nonverbal responses. Results indicated that the Down syndrome group possessed deficits in both storage and retrieval abilities, with storage of visually presented stimuli being particularly impaired.

Abstract: Two experimental paradigms are presented aimed at determining the retention of auditory and visual information over brief delay intervals. First, a conditional delayed matching-to-sample procedure was used in which rats were required to symbolically match the modality of the sample stimulus with one of two comparison stimuli. In the second experiment, subjects were trained and tested using a Konorski-type procedure. Despite the conceptual and procedural differences between the two procedures, subjects in both experiments showed steeper forgetting functions for visual events than for auditory events, while performance levels at 0-sec delay intervals were equivalent for both stimuli. These results, when taken together with related research conducted with pigeons, suggest that content of memory may have important influences on the short-term retention abilities of animal subjects.

Abstract: Four experiments were conducted to determine whether the increased reaction time produced by loading memory with a set of irrelevant items depended on the complexity of the stage structure or of the stimulus-response (S-R) mapping rules underlying the task. In each experiment, reaction-time tasks varying in complexity were performed alone and in the retention interval of a short-term memory task requiring ordered recall of eight digits. Experiment 1 compared simple, choice, and go/no-go tasks over 3 days of practice and found no interaction between memory load and task complexity. Experiment 2 replicated the first day of Experiment 1 with more power and again found no interaction. Since the different tasks required different numbers of stages, this ruled out stage structure as a factor loading memory. However, in Experiment 1 and 2, the same subjects performed all three tasks with the same set of letters and may have developed one comprehensive set of mapping rules for all three tasks, essentially eliminating differences in memory demands between tasks. Experiment 3 used different groups of subjects for a simple and a choice task with letters as stimuli to encourage the development of separate, differentially complex mapping rules for each task and found more interference in the choice task than in the simple task. Experiment 4 involved one group that performed the choice task with letters and the simple task with dots presented at different positions in the visual field, and another group that performed the simple task with letters and the choice task with dots. Comparisons within subjects between materials and between subjects within materials showed that with letters as stimuli, the choice task suffered more interference than the simple task. However, the choice task with dots showed no such pattern, perhaps because of high ideomotor compatibility. It is concluded that S-R mapping rules are held in memory to enable performance on reaction-time tasks, and the findings are discussed in terms of strategies, preparation, and attentional control.

Abstract: Two experiments sought to determine if pigeons could discriminate and remember recent sequences of stimuli and responses. A variant of Konorski's short-term memory procedure involving successive presentation of sample and test stimuli was used. The samples were stimulus-response pairs of the form, (S-R)1–(S-R)2. Differential test responding disclosed memory of the two-item samples, with birds showing earlier and greater control by the second item than the first (Experiment 1). When the retention interval separating the second item of the sample sequence from the test stimulus was lenghtened from .5 to 2.0 or 4.0 sec, a systematic loss of stimulus control resulted; however, when varied over the same temporal range, the interval between the two items of the sample sequence had a much smaller effect, or none at all (Experiment 2). These results support an account of response-sequence differentiation that stresses short-term memory of organized behavior patterns.

Abstract: Three measures of listening—short-term (STL), short-term listening with rehearsal (STL-R), and lecture comprehension—were compared with other scores of general mental ability and classroom performance scores. The listening measures were significantly different from each other in relation to ACT composite scores. Short-term listening related most closely to oral performance whereas lecture comprehension did so to general mental ability and written examination scores. Listening behavior seems not to be a singular skill but a very complex process.

Abstract: Three groups of learning disabled children, defined on the basis of their Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children profiles, and one control group of normal readers were asked to retain verbal material across distractor intervals ranging from zero to 18 seconds. None of the learning disabled groups (low verbal, high performance; high verbal, low performance; verbal equals performance) performed worse on this task than the normal controls. Furthermore, the older learning disabled children in the high-verbal, low-performance group actually retained somewhat more material than the normal control group. It was concluded that at least on this standard version of a short-term retention assessment task, learning disabled children are not at a significant disadvantage.

Abstract: The hypothesis was tested that, when the mode of presentation matches the mode of reproduction in memory for movement extent, there is less error in reproduction than when the modes are not matched. Female undergraduates (n = 24) were tested under active and passive criterion movements presented either under preselected or constrained conditions. All subjects underwent 36 trials involving the combination of three retention conditions (immediate, 20-sec unfilled, and 20-sec filled) and two reproduction conditions (active and passive). Results for absolute error showed that for constrained presentations, when the mode of presentation and the mode of reproduction were the same, accuracy was greater than when the modes of presentation and reproduction were different.

Abstract: Publisher Summary This chapter discusses an event-related potential (ERP) analysis of coding processes in human memory. The endogenous ERPs have been shown to vary in the context of learning and memory tasks. For example, several lines of evidence indicate that the contingent negative variation (CNV) and P300 components reflect the processes of acquisition and retention in short term memory situations. One question to emerge from these results is the extent to which ERP changes can be related to retention over the longer term, i.e., in situations where memory is not tested immediately on every trial. It would be of interest to observe the extent to which ERPs reflect the level of perceptual processing at acquisition, and how such processing manifests itself in memory performance. Phonemic encodings yield intermediate performance. An ancillary finding is that words yielding a “yes” response to a query are better remembered than those yielding a “no” response in phonemic and semantic levels of processing. These effects have been obtained in a number of other experiments and represent a robust behavioral phenomenon with which to test the utility of ERPs as indices of learning and memory.

Abstract: Memory tasks administered individually to grade one and grade four good and poor spellers were scored for both gross and ordered sequential recall. Good spellers were found to have higher threshold scores in gross memory rather than specifically superior sequential memory. Although Memory for Digits (grade one) and Memory for Pictures (at both levels) did not discriminate between good and poor spellers, good spellers were superior in all verbal linguistic short-term memory tasks. A sequentially related factor did appear to mediate for the good spellers, but it involved an ability to exploit internalized sequential constraints of overlearned verbal linguistic material rather than an ability to echo stimuli.

Abstract: The investigation examines the effects of different input-modality/output-modality pairings on the short-term memory of 6th graders identified as mathematics-proficient or mathematics-disabled. Serial lists of digits and consonants were presented visually and aurally to each subject. Subjects responded either verbally or graphic symbolically during an immediate recall procedure. A significant 2-way input-modality by output-modality interaction suggested that short-term memory capacity among the 3 groups (2 mathematics-disabled groups and a control mathematics-proficient group) differed as a function of the modality used to present the items in combination with the output response required. The findings are discussed relative to the ineffective use of memory codes by the disabled students and the usefulness of the modality model as an instructional procedure and curricular rationale.

Abstract: Publisher Summary This chapter discusses contingent negative variation (CNV) during memory retrieval by normal and retarded adults. The moderately and mildly retarded with no apparent organic or medical involvement are known to do poorly on short term memory tasks. They are also known to perform slower memory scans than normals of the same age, at least for alphanumeric stimuli. On the other hand, these memory scan studies have shown no qualitative difference between the retarded and normal's scan stage of processing. The present chapter is of initial findings of memory scan and event-related potentials in the retarded and during development. It is expected that event-related potentials (CNV and P300) could provide additional information on the processes responsible for the slower scans of the retarded. Any interpretation of the retarded data must be considered tentative because of the small sample relative to the large variability. There are, however, a few points that are suggestive of the results of previous studies. As with other memory scanning studies the retarded had slower scans.

Abstract: The N1 component of auditory evoked potentials varies in amplitude as a function of the direction of attention and has been treated as a physiological correlate of stimulus set. Results from a sequential pitch memory experiment, presented here, show that N1 also indexes the strengths of short-term associations, suggesting that the N1 mechanism(s) may be involved in a more general process of organizing and/or maintaining temporary sensorimotor memories. Language: en

Abstract: Research studies on the process of remembering, which is a complex characteristic of human beings, involve investigations of how we perceive, learn, store, and retrieve the large amount of information that we encounter in our environment each day. Psychologists studying memory for sequences of items are investigating one aspect of a human’s ability to remember information. Researchers studying short-term memory in the laboratory have used an information-processing approach and have modeled human memory processes using an analogy of a complex computer. Many assumptions are made about how humans remember when using this informationprocessing language to describe memorial processes for the somewhat “simplified” laboratory memory task. The focus of this paper is a retrospective review of the coding strategies used by subjects in remembering. Most of these coding processes or strategies are inferred from studies involving sequences of items presented in a serial order either visually (by slides, for example) or auditorily (as by taperecorded voice). In these tasks we are attempting to study human ability to organize relatively random sequences of digits, letters, words, shapes, and the like. In investigating coding processes, we are trying to understand the operations the subject performs on the items presented in transforming those items for recall. Several authors have made a distinction between the reduction and elaboration of items for coding processes.’ A recent summary of the various types of elaboration and reduction coding can be found in Herriot* or in the paper published by Craik and Lockharts in 1972. Elaboration coding for an individual item is assumed to be used by the subject to provide enough unique features to successfully discriminate that item from other items. Items can be elaborated on by the codes that a subject extracts or adds at the time of presentation of items, during the storage time required, or during the act of retrieving the item. Reductive coding, on the other hand, may be exemplified by a transformation of each three binary numbers into a six-unit octal code during the presentation of 18 binary digits. Experimenters investigating coding processes that a subject uses for a particular sequence of items also recognize that subjects can do more than one type of coding on items if given adequate time and instructions to do so. In studies of coding, experimental procedures include manipulation of both the characteristics of the sequences of items and the instructions about how to reproduce the items given. If the items are to be recalled in the exact order presented, we are studying “serial” recall processes involved in retrieving both order and item information from short-term memory

Abstract: Flavell (1970) stated that, if a mnemonic strategy is required for efficient performance on a cask, developmental differences will be obtained. When such strategy is either not required or prohibited, the task will be relatively insensitive to developmental trends. Flavell (1970) found that deficiencies of young children on short-term memory verbal tasks can be partly attributed to a failure to adopt the strategy of spontaneous rehearsal. Broadbent (1958) proposed that it is meaningful to talk about rehearsal of material in non-verbal form if rehearsal requires a portion of the subject's central processing capacity. Both visual motor information (Posner, 1967) and motor information (Laabs, 1973) are better retained when this central processing capacity is available. Two experiments were performed to investigate developmental strategies in a motor and visual motor short term memory task. In each experiment, three groups of 15 boys, aged 6, 9, and 12 yr., were employed. All performed a positioning task with retention intervals of 10 and 30 sec., and with a rest period or interpolated activity during the retention interval. In Exp. 1 both visual and kinaesthetic cues were available, whereas in Exp. 2 only kinaesthetic cues were present. In both experiments developmental differences were evidenced between the 6-yr.olds and the other two age groups, as measured by absolute and variable error scores, but there were no significant differences between the 9and 12-yr.-olds. Six-yr.-olds did not show the mnemonic strategy of spontaneous rehearsal while it was a characteristic feature of the 9and 12-yr-olds' performance. This was in evidence during the rest condition where the 9and 12-yr.-olds had significantly fewer errors than during the interpolated activity. The type of activity during the retention interval did not affect errors of the 6-yr.-olds. The results were consistent with studies of develo~mental verbal memory, illustrating that: ( a ) tasks are developmentally sensitive to the degree that they demand strategic transformations for their efficient execution, and (b ) the characteristic feature of the immature memorizer is a lack of spontaneous use of control processes, active mediational devices, and strategic transformations of the input. Both experiments showed error to be an increasing function of the retention interval, and as expected, errors on the purely motor task were greater than when vision was also present.