Remembering over the short-term: the case against the standard model

Working memory limitations constrain visual episodic long-term memory at both specific and gist levels of representation

Limitations in one's capacity to encode information in working memory (WM) constrain later access to that information in long-term memory (LTM). The present study examined whether these WM constraints on episodic LTM are limited to specific representations of past episodes or also extend to gist representations. Across three experiments, young adult participants (n = 40 per experiment) studied objects in set sizes of two or six items, either sequentially (Experiments 1a and 1b) or simultaneously (Experiment 2). They then completed old/new recognition tests immediately after each sequence (WM tests). After a long study phase, participants completed LTM conjoint recognition tests, featuring old but untested items from the WM phase, lures that were similar to studied items at gist but not specific levels of representation, and new items unrelated to studied items at both specific and gist levels of representation. Results showed that LTM estimates of specific and gist memory representations from a multinomial-processing-tree model were reduced for items encoded under supra-capacity set sizes (six items) relative to within-capacity set sizes (two items). These results suggest that WM encoding capacity limitations constrain episodic LTM at both specific and gist levels of representation, at least for visual objects. The ability to retrieve from LTM each type of representation for a visual item is contingent on the degree to which the item could be encoded in WM.

The role of culture and semantic organization in working memory updating

Westerners tend to relate items in a categorical manner, whereas Easterners focus more on functional relationships. The present study extended research on semantic organization in long-term memory to working memory. First, Americans' and Turks' preferences for categorical versus functional relationships were tested. Second, working memory interference was assessed using a 2-back working memory paradigm in which lure items were categorically and functionally related to targets. Next, a mediation model tested direct effects of culture and semantic organization on working memory task behaviour, and the indirect effect, whether semantic organization mediated the relationship between culture and working memory interference. Whereas Americans had slower response times to correctly rejecting functional lures compared to categorical lures, conditions did not differ for Turks. However, semantic organization did not mediate cultural difference in working memory interference. Across cultures, there was evidence that semantic organization affected working memory errors, with individuals who endorsed categorical more than functional pairings committing more categorical than functional errors on the 2-back task. Results align with prior research suggesting individual differences in use of different types of semantic relationships, and further that literature by indicating effects on interference in working memory. However, these individual differences may not be culture-dependent.

Short-term retention of words as a function of encoding depth

The traditional short- and long-term storage view of information processing and the levels-of-processing view both discuss the forgetting of information over time. In the traditional stage view, there is loss of at least poorly encoded information across several seconds when the information cannot be rehearsed (e.g., Ricker et al., 2020, Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 46, 60-76). In the levels-of-processing approach, information that is encoded in a shallow manner is lost more quickly over time than deeply-encoded information (Craik & Lockhart, 1972, Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 11, 671-684.). Previous studies of the depth of encoding, however, have mostly been conducted using delayed tests, so there are few studies directly comparing the rate of forgetting over time for information as a function of different depths of encoding. We manipulated the level of processing with immediate recall in a modified Brown-Peterson task. An effect of the level of processing was robust, but evidence of forgetting across retention intervals was not always observed. When encoding time was curtailed (in Experiments 3 and 4), we found main effects of both the level of processing and the retention interval, but no interaction between the two variables. The results suggest that the depth-of-encoding effect may occur during the initial encoding of items, but without differential forgetting within the range of retention intervals that we examined (0-18 s), in contrast to the suggestion by Craik and Lockhart. Further work is needed to determine whether the depth-of-processing effect would grow over longer intervals.

Comparison of semantic and phonological false memories in short- and long-term tests

The Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm has been at the centre of false memory research. Whereas most work with this paradigm has examined memory at the long term and with semantically associated lists, the present study examines phonological and semantic false memories at both short- and long-term delays. In two experiments, participants studied short lists containing six (Experiment 1) or four (Experiment 2) items, either semantically or phonologically related to the same non-studied critical items (CI). Following each list, participants completed 36 trials of an immediate recognition task (short-term memory [STM]-only condition) only or they also completed a surprise recognition test after a 1-min delay after all 36 STM trials (STM + long-term memory [LTM] condition). In STM, false alarms were higher in phonological lists, whereas after the delay, false alarms were higher in semantic lists, reflecting differential sensitivity to the type of association as a function of delay. A third experiment examined LTM performance after controlling for prior testing and yielded highly similar results. Both the activation-monitoring framework (AMF) and fuzzy-trace theory (FTT) can explain the majority of the findings, with some remaining issues. These results confirm that information from the knowledge base (LTM) does influence accuracy in an STM task, albeit less so than perceptual level similarity.

When Does Episodic Memory Contribute to Performance in Tests of Working Memory?

Both the experimental and the psychometric investigation of the WM capacity limit depend critically on the assumption that performance in our tests of WM reflects that capacity limit to a good approximation. Most tasks to measure WM rely on testing memory after a short time during which participants are asked to maintain information in WM. In these tests, episodic long-term memory is likely to also lay down a trace of the memory set. Therefore, participants can draw on two sources of information when memory is tested, making it difficult to separate the contributions of WM and episodic LTM to the performance on immediate-memory tests. Here we use proactive interference to distinguish between these two sources of remembered information, building on the fact that episodic memory is vulnerable to proactive interference, whereas WM is protected against it. We use a release-from-PI paradigm to determine the extent to which commonly used WM tasks reflect contributions from episodic LTM. We focus on memory for serial order of verbal lists, but also include visual and spatial WM tasks. The results of five experiments demonstrate that although some tasks used to investigate WM are heavily contaminated by episodic LTM, other popular paradigms such as serial and probed recall, and the standard version of the continuous color-reproduction task, are not. Measuring proactive interference can help researchers determine the extent to which WM and episodic LTM contribute to performance in immediate-memory tasks.

Short-term synaptic plasticity in emerging devices for neuromorphic computing

Neuromorphic computing is a promising computing paradigm toward building next-generation artificial intelligence machines, in which diverse types of synaptic plasticity play an active role in information processing. Compared to long-term plasticity (LTP) forming the foundation of learning and memory, short-term plasticity (STP) is essential for critical computational functions. So far, the practical applications of LTP have been widely investigated, whereas the implementation of STP in hardware is still elusive. Here, we review the development of STP by bridging the physics in emerging devices and biological behaviors. We explore the computational functions of various STP in biology and review their recent progress. Finally, we discuss the main challenges of introducing STP into synaptic devices and offer the potential approaches to utilize STP to enrich systems' capabilities. This review is expected to provide prospective ideas for implementing STP in emerging devices and may promote the construction of high-level neuromorphic machines.

The effects of diurnal variability and modality on false memories formation

The main objective of the current study was to investigate the effect of time of day on visual and auditory, short-term memory (STM), and long-term memory (LTM) distortions using a hybrid Deese-Roediger-McDermott procedure. In Experiment 1, we used semantically related words, whereas in Experiment 2 - words were characterized by phonological similarity. The results showed a relationship between modality and types of stimuli. In STM, more semantic errors were found in the evening for items presented visually and more errors following auditory presentation for phonologically similar words. In LTM, the analysis revealed a higher rate of semantic distortions in the evening hours for auditorily presented words. For words with phonological similarity, we observed more errors in the evening without the effect of modality. The results support the hypothesis that more reliance is placed on elaborative processing in the evening and more on maintenance processing in the morning; however, this is not modality invariant.

The medial temporal lobe supports the quality of visual short-term memory representation

The quality of short-term memory (STM) underlies our ability to recall the exact details of a recent event, yet how the human brain enables this core cognitive function remains poorly understood. Here we use multiple experimental approaches to test the hypothesis that the quality of STM, such as its precision or fidelity, relies on the medial temporal lobe (MTL), a region commonly associated with the ability to distinguish similar information remembered in long-term memory. First, with intracranial recordings, we find that delay-period MTL activity retains item-specific STM content that is predictive of subsequent recall precision. Second, STM recall precision is associated with an increase in the strength of intrinsic MTL-to-neocortical functional connections during a brief retention interval. Finally, perturbing the MTL through electrical stimulation or surgical removal can selectively reduce STM precision. Collectively, these findings provide converging evidence that the MTL is critically involved in the quality of STM representation.

The contribution of episodic long-term memory to working memory for bindings

The present experiments support two conclusions about the capacity limit of working memory (WM). First, they provide evidence for the Binding Hypothesis, WM capacity is limited by interference between bindings but not items. Second, they show that episodic LTM contributes substantially to binding memory when the capacity of WM is stretched to the limit by larger set sizes. We tested immediate memory for sets of word-picture pairs. With increasing set size, memory for bindings declined more precipitously than memory for items, as predicted from the binding hypothesis. Yet, at higher set sizes performance was more stable than expected from a capacity limited memory, suggesting a contribution of episodic long-term memory (LTM) to circumvent the WM capacity limit. In support of that hypothesis, we show a double dissociation of contributions of WM and episodic LTM to binding memory: Performance at set sizes larger than 3 was specifically affected by proactive interference - but were immune to influences from a distractor-filled delay. In contrast, performance at set size 2 was unaffected by proactive interference but harmed by a distractor-filled delay.

Sequential versus simultaneous presentation of memoranda in verbal working memory: (How) does it matter?

To-be-memorized information in verbal working memory (WM) can be presented sequentially, like in oral language, and simultaneously, like in written language. Few studies have addressed the importance and implications for verbal WM processing of these two presentation modes. While sequential presentation may favor discrete, temporal encoding processes, simultaneous presentation may favor spatial encoding processes. We compared immediate serial recall tasks for sequential versus simultaneous word list presentation with a specific focus on serial position curves of recall performance, transposition gradients, and the nature of serial order errors. First, we observed higher recall performance in the simultaneous compared to the sequential conditions, with a particularly large effect at end-of-list items. Moreover, results showed more transposition errors between non-adjacent items for the sequential condition, as well as more omission errors especially for start-of-list items. This observation can be explained in terms of differences in refreshing opportunities for start-of-list items during encoding between conditions. This study shows that the presentation mode of sequential material can have a significant impact on verbal WM performance, with an advantage for simultaneous encoding of sequence information.

Explaining short-term memory phenomena with long-term memory theory: Is a special state involved?

The idea that some recently encountered items reside in a special state where they do not have to be retrieved has come to be a critical component of short-term memory theories. In the current work, the existence of such a special state was tested using the probe-recognition paradigm followed by a delayed recognition test. Across two experiments participants received a series of probe recognition trials where list lengths of 1-, 4- and 8-items were intermixed. Delayed recognition performance for non-target probes was poorer for the only item in 1-item lists than for the last item in multi-item lists. At the same time, the delayed recognition of studied-but-not probed items was better for the 1-item list, compared to the last item in a multi-item list, indicating that some form of a retrieval effect was involved and not lower levels of attention/initial learning. An examination of the size of the testing effect as it varied across list lengths and experiments also indicated that residence in a special state was not playing an important role. Overall, the data are not in support of the assumption that items at the focus of attention are in a special state that do not require retrieval. Our conclusions are that special states cannot be used to define STM memory and that the probe recognition paradigm may be useful in determining how testing affects memory.

The repetition of errors in recall: a review of four 'fragmentation' experiments

This review reanalyses the data from four experiments originally designed to test the fragmentation hypothesis. Participants were asked to recall triple or quadruple associates, cued by each of their components in turn, and to guess if they could not remember. There were many errors in recall and many of those errors were repetitions of previous errors. This reanalysis focuses, not on the fragmentation hypothesis, but on the repetition of errors. It works backwards through sequences of test trials to discover the best prior match to the responses on each trial. It reports frequencies of different categories of repetition, conditional probabilities of repetition, correct recalls, and the probability of repetition in relation to the lag between trial and match in the test sequence. These results may be summarised as (1) every event (a stimulus or a response or just a retrieval) to which the participant attends is separately recorded in memory, creating an ordered record of those events that have engaged the participant's attention; (2) the compilation of the record is automatic; while attention to a stimulus is at the participant's disposal, the consequent entry into memory is not, and (3) the retrieval of a potential response from memory is spontaneous; that retrieval becomes an overt response if it is compatible with the cue. This makes sense of a number of historic anomalies in the study of recall and informs some contemporary problems in the study of short-term memory.

Working memory development: A 50-year assessment of research and underlying theories

The author has thought about working memory, not always by that name, since 1969 and has conducted research on its infant and child development since the same year that the seminal work of Baddeley and Hitch (1974) was published. The present article assesses how the field of working memory development has been influenced since those years by major theoretical perspectives: empiricism (along with behaviorism), nativism (along with modularity), cognitivism (along with constructivism), and dynamic systems theory. The field has not fully discussed the point that these theoretical perspectives have helped to shape different kinds of proposed working memory systems, which in turn have deeply influenced what is researched and how it is researched. Here I discuss that mapping of theoretical viewpoints onto assumptions about working memory and trace the influence of this mapping on the field of working memory development. I illustrate where these influences have led in my own developmental research program over the years.

Meaningful Versus Meaningless Sounds and Words

The current study assessed memory performance for perceptually similar environmental sounds and speech-based material after short and long delays. In two studies, we demonstrated a similar pattern of memory performance for sounds and words in short-term memory, yet in long-term memory, the performance patterns differed. Experiment 1 examined the effects of two different types of sounds: meaningful (MFUL) and meaningless (MLESS), whereas Experiment 2 assessed memory performance for words and nonwords. We utilized a modified version of the classical Deese-Roediger-McDermott (Deese, 1959; Roediger & McDermott, 1995) procedure and adjusted it to test the effects of acoustic similarities between auditorily presented stimuli. Our findings revealed no difference in memory performance between MFUL and MLESS sounds, and between words and nonwords after short delays. However, following long delays, greater reliance on meaning was noticed for MFUL sounds than MLESS sounds, while performance for linguistic material did not differ between words and nonwords. Importantly, participants' memory performance for words and nonwords was accompanied by a more lenient response strategy. The results are discussed in terms of perceptual and semantic similarities between MLESS and MFUL sounds, as well as between words and nonwords.

Failures of memory and the fate of forgotten memories

This review is intended primarily to provide cognitive benchmarks and perhaps a new mindset for behavioral neuroscientists who study memory. Forgetting, defined here broadly as all types of decreases in acquired responding to stimulus-specific eliciting cues, is commonly attributed to one or more of the following families of mechanisms: (1) (4) associative interference by information similar to, but different from the target information, (2) spontaneous decay of memory with increasing retention intervals, (3) displacement from short-term memory by irrelevant information, and (4) inadequate retrieval cues at test. I briefly review each of these families and discuss data suggesting that many apparent instances of spontaneous forgetting and displacement from short-term memory can be viewed as variants of inadequate retrieval cues and associative interference. The potential for recovery of target information from each of these families of forgetting without further relevant training is then reviewed, with a conclusion that most forgetting is due to retrieval failure as opposed to irreversible erasure of memory. The more general point is made that there are logical problems with ever talking about attenuating or erasing a memory as a consequence of conventional forgetting or disrupted consolidation/reconsolidation. Consideration is then given to the frequently overlooked but highly beneficial consequences of most forgetting. Lastly, the major variables that moderate forgetting are summarized, including (a) the similarities of the target information including training context to the explicit retrieval cues and context present at test, (b) the similarities of potentially interfering acquired information to the retrieval cues and context present at test, and (c) the retention interval for the target information relative to that for the potentially interfering information. Appropriate manipulation of these variables can reduce forgetting, and increase forgetting when desired.

Assessing Intervention Effects in Sentence Processing: Object Relatives vs. Subject Control

Object relative clauses are harder to process than subject relative clauses. Under Grillo’s (2009) Generalized Minimality framework, complexity effects of object relatives are construed as intervention effects, which result from an interaction between locality constraints on movement (Relativized Minimality) and the sentence processing system. Specifically, intervention of the subject DP in the movement dependency is expected to generate a minimality violation whenever processing limitations render the moved object underspecified, resulting in compromised comprehension. In the present study, assuming Generalized Minimality, we compared the processing of object relatives with the processing of subject control in ditransitives, which, like object relatives, instantiates a syntactic dependency across an intervening DP. This comparison is justified by the current debate on whether Control should be analyzed as movement: if control involves movement of the controller DP, as proposed by Hornstein (1999), a parallel between the processing of object relatives and subject control in ditransitives may be anticipated on the basis of intervention. In addition, we explored whether general cognitive factors contribute to complexity effects ascribed to movement across a DP. Sixty-nine adult speakers of European Portuguese read sentences and answered comprehension probes in a self-paced reading task with moving-window display, comprising four experimental conditions: Subject Relatives; Object Relatives; Subject Control; Object Control. Furthermore, participants performed four supplementary tasks, serving as measures of resistance to interference, lexical knowledge, working memory capacity and lexical access ability. The results from the reading task showed that whereas object relatives were harder to process than subject relatives, subject control was not harder to process than object control, arguing against recent movement accounts of control. Furthermore, we found that whereas object relative complexity effects assessed by response times to comprehension probes interacted with Reading Span, object relative complexity effects assessed by comprehension accuracy and reading times did not interact with any of the supplementary tasks. We discuss these results in light of Generalized Minimality and the hypothesis of modularity in syntactic processing (Caplan and Waters, 1999).

Explaining short-term memory phenomena with an integrated episodic/semantic framework of long-term memory

Current thinking about human memory is dominated by distinctions between episodic and semantic memory and between short-term memory (STM) and long-term memory (LTM). However, many memory phenomena seem to cut across these distinctions. This article attempts to set the groundwork for the issues that need to be resolved in generating an integrated model of long-term memory that incorporates semantic, episodic, and short-term memory. We contrast Nairne's (2002, Annual Review of Psychology) consensus account of short-term memory with a relatively generic theory of an integrated episodic-semantic memory. The later consists primarily of a list of principles which we and others argue are necessary to include in any theory of long-term memory. We then add some more specific assumptions to outline a modern theory of forgetting. We then turn to the issue of much of the phenomena thought to necessitate a dedicated short-term memory can be explained by an integrated theory of episodic and semantic memory. Our conclusion is that an integrated theory of long-term memory must be augmented to explain a small number of outstanding memory phenomena. Finally, we ask whether the augmentation needs to involve a dedicated mnemonic system, or sensory or language-based systems, which also have mnemonic capabilities.

The long-term consequences of retrieval demands during working memory

Although it is well known that distraction impairs immediate retrieval of items maintained in working memory (WM; e.g., during complex span tasks), some evidence suggests that these items are more likely to be recalled from episodic memory (EM) compared with items that were studied without any distraction (e.g., during simple span tasks). One account for this delayed advantage of complex span over simple span, or the McCabe effect (McCabe, Journal of Memory and Language, 58[2], 480–494, 2008), is that complex span affords covert retrieval opportunities that facilitate later retrieval from EM by cumulatively reactivating each successively presented item after distraction. This explanation focuses on the processing that occurs during presentation and maintenance of the items, but no work to date has explored whether the differential demands of immediate retrieval between simple and complex span may explain the effect. Accordingly, these experiments examined the impact of immediate retrieval demands on the McCabe effect by comparing typical immediate serial-recall instructions (i.e., recalling the words in their exact order of presentation) to immediate free-recall (Experiments 1–2) and no-recall (Experiments 2 and 3) instructions. The results suggested that the nature of retrieval may constrain the McCabe effect in some situations (Experiments 1–2), but its demands do not drive the McCabe effect given that it was observed in both serial-recall and no-recall conditions (Experiment 3). Instead, activities such as covert retrieval during the processing phase may underlie the McCabe effect, thus further evidencing the importance of processing in WM for the long-term retention of information.

Examining the Neural Basis of Congruent and Incongruent Configural Contexts during Associative Retrieval

Disrupting the configural context, or relative organization and orientation of paired stimuli, between encoding and retrieval negatively impacts memory. Using univariate and multivariate fMRI analyses, we examined the effect of retaining and manipulating the configural context on neural mechanisms supporting associative retrieval. Behavioral results showed participants had significantly higher hit rates for recollecting pairs in a contextually congruent, versus incongruent, configuration. In addition, contextual congruency between memory phases was a critical determinant to characterizing both the magnitude and patterns of neural activation within visual and parietal cortices. Regions within visual cortices also exhibited higher correlations between patterns of activity at encoding and retrieval when configural context was congruent across memory phases than incongruent. Collectively, these findings shed light on how manipulating configural context between encoding and retrieval affects associative recognition, with changes in the configural context leading to reductions in information transfer and increases in task difficulty.

Do familiar memory items decay?

There is a long-standing debate over whether the passage of time causes forgetting from working memory, a process called trace decay. Researchers providing evidence against the existence of trace decay generally study memory by presenting familiar verbal memory items for 1 s or more per memory item, during the study period. In contrast, researchers providing evidence for trace decay tend to use unfamiliar nonverbal memory items presented for 1 s or less per memory item, during the study period. Taken together, these investigations suggest that familiar items may not decay while unfamiliar items do decay. The availability of verbal rehearsal and the time to consolidate a memory item into working memory during presentation may also play a role in whether or not trace decay will occur. Here we explore these alternatives in a series of experiments closely modeled after studies demonstrating time-based forgetting from working memory, but using familiar verbal memory items in place of the unfamiliar memory items used to observe decay in the past. Our findings suggest that time-based forgetting is persistent across all of these factors while simultaneously challenging prominent views of trace decay. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

From short-term store to multicomponent working memory: The role of the modal model

The term "modal model" reflects the importance of Atkinson and Shiffrin's paper in capturing the major developments in the cognitive psychology of memory that were achieved over the previous decade, providing an integrated framework that has formed the basis for many future developments. The fact that it is still the most cited model from that period some 50 years later has, we suggest, implications for the model itself and for theorising in psychology more generally. We review the essential foundations of the model before going on to discuss briefly the way in which one of its components, the short-term store, had influenced our own concept of a multicomponent working memory. This is followed by a discussion of recent claims that the concept of a short-term store be replaced by an interpretation in terms of activated long-term memory. We present several reasons to question these proposals. We conclude with a brief discussion of the implications of the longevity of the modal model for styles of theorising in cognitive psychology.

Visual short-term memory capacity predicts the "bandwidth" of visual long-term memory encoding

We are capable of storing a virtually infinite amount of visual information in visual long-term memory (VLTM) storage. At the same time, the amount of visual information we can encode and maintain in visual short-term memory (VSTM) at a given time is severely limited. How do these two memory systems interact to accumulate vast amount of VLTM? In this series of experiments, we exploited interindividual and intraindividual differences VSTM capacity to examine the direct involvement of VSTM in determining the encoding rate (or "bandwidth") of VLTM. Here, we found that the amount of visual information encoded into VSTM at a given moment (i.e., VSTM capacity), but neither the maintenance duration nor the test process, predicts the effective encoding "bandwidth" of VLTM.

Scale-invariant Characteristics of Forgetting: Toward a Unifying Account of Hippocampal Forgetting across Short and Long Timescales

After over 100 years of relative silence in the cognitive literature, recent advances in the study of the neural underpinnings of memory-specifically, the hippocampus-have led to a resurgence of interest in the topic of forgetting. This review draws a theoretically driven picture of the effects of time on forgetting of hippocampus-dependent memories. We review evidence indicating that time-dependent forgetting across short and long timescales is reflected in progressive degradation of hippocampal-dependent relational information. This evidence provides an important extension to a growing body of research accumulated in recent years, showing that-in contrast to the once prevailing view that the hippocampus is exclusively involved in memory and forgetting over long timescales-the role of the hippocampus also extends to memory and forgetting over short timescales. Thus, we maintain that similar rules govern not only remembering but also forgetting of hippocampus-dependent information over short and long timescales.

Dissociating refreshing and elaboration and their impacts on memory

Maintenance of information in working memory (WM) is assumed to rely on refreshing and elaboration, but clear mechanistic descriptions of these cognitive processes are lacking, and it is unclear whether they are simply two labels for the same process. This fMRI study investigated the extent to which refreshing, elaboration, and repeating of items in WM are distinct neural processes with dissociable behavioral outcomes in WM and long-term memory (LTM). Multivariate pattern analyses of fMRI data revealed differentiable neural signatures for these processes, which we also replicated in an independent sample of older adults. In some cases, the degree of neural separation within an individual predicted their memory performance. Elaboration improved LTM, but not WM, and this benefit increased as its neural signature became more distinct from repetition. Refreshing had no impact on LTM, but did improve WM, although the neural discrimination of this process was not predictive of the degree of improvement. These results demonstrate that refreshing and elaboration are separate processes that differently contribute to memory performance.

Short-term memory based on activated long-term memory: A review in response to Norris (2017)

Short-term memory (STM), the limited information temporarily in a state of heightened accessibility, includes just-presented events and recently retrieved information. Norris (2017) argued for a prominent class of theories in which STM depends on the brain keeping a separate copy of new information, and against alternatives in which the information is held only in a portion of long-term memory (LTM) that is currently activated (aLTM). Here I question premises of Norris' case for separate-copy theories in the following ways. (a) He did not allow for implications of the common assumption (e.g., Cowan, 1999; Cowan & Chen, 2009) that aLTM can include new, rapidly formed LTM records of a trial within an STM task. (b) His conclusions from pathological cases of impaired STM along with intact LTM are tenuous; these rare cases can be explained by impairments in encoding, processing, or retrieval related to LTM rather than passive maintenance. (c) Although Norris reasonably allowed structured pointers to aLTM instead of separate copies of the actual item representations in STM, the same structured pointers may well be involved in long-term learning. (d) Last, models of STM storage can serve as the front end of an LTM learning system rather than being separate. I summarize evidence for these premises and an updated version of an alternative theory in which storage depends on aLTM (newly clarified), and, embedded within it, information enhanced by the current focus of attention (Cowan, 1988, 1999), with no need for a separate STM copy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Short-term false memories vary as a function of list type

False memories have primarily been investigated at long-term delays in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) procedure, but a few studies have reported meaning-based false memories at delays as short as 1-4 s. The current study further investigated the processes that contribute to short-term false memories with semantic and phonological lists (Experiment 1) and hybrid lists containing items of each type (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, more false memories were found for phonological than for semantic lists. In Experiment 2, an asymmetrical hyper-additive effect was found such that including one or two phonological associates in pure semantic lists yielded a robust increase in false alarms, whereas including semantic associates in pure phonological lists did not affect false alarms. These results are more consistent with the activation-monitoring account of false memory creation than with fuzzy trace theory that has not typically been referenced when describing phonological false memories.

Proximity and Same Case Marking Do Not Increase Attraction Effect in Comprehension: Evidence From Eye-Tracking Experiments in Korean

Previous studies have suggested that during the on-line sentence processing, relevant memory representations are directly accessed based on cues at retrieval (McElree et al., 2003). Under this hypothesis, retrieval cues activate any memory representation with matching features, leading to the so-called attraction effect. This predicts that attraction effects would be modulated by memory representation of a distractor. Here, we investigated this possibility, focusing on two factors (i.e., proximity to the retrieval point and the number of matching features) that would affect representation of a distractor in three Korean eye-tracking experiments. We predicted that if memory representation of a distractor decays over time, a distractor close to a retrieval point would lead to stronger attraction effects. We also predicted that a distractor would be more likely to lead to interference when it shares a higher number of matching features with the retrieval cues of a dependency, relative to the target of the dependency, due to multiple direct accesses based on multiple matching cues. However, the results did not show evidence that proximity of a distractor to the retrieval point enhanced attraction effects. Likewise, there was no evidence that a greater number of matching cues of a distractor alone would trigger more mis-retrieval, in contrast to a previous finding that a greater number of mismatching cues of a licit antecedent in addition to a greater number of matching cues of a distractor did so (Parker and Phillips, 2017). On the other hand, the results suggested that a distractor marked with nominative case was more likely to be mis-retrieved as the subject of a verb, compared to a distractor marked with a dative case, suggesting that the subject grammatical role is a critical cue for a subject-verb agreement. These results are best compatible with the hypothesis that retrieval cues are weighted, possibly depending on the nature of the dependency that is currently processed.