SOME QUESTIONS

WE WILL CONSIDER S o much has been written about memory—the advantages of having a good memory,
the pitfalls of forgetting, or in the worst case, losing one’s ability to remember—that
it may hardly seem necessary to read a cognitive psychology textbook to understand what
◗◗ Why can we remember a
telephone number long enough memory is. But as you will see over the next four chapters, “memory” is not just one thing.
to place a call, but then we Memory, like attention, comes in many forms. One of the purposes of this chapter and the
forget it almost immediately?
next is to introduce the different types of memory, describing the properties of each type
(138)
and the mechanisms responsible for them. Let’s begin with two definitions of memory:
◗◗ How is memory involved in
processes such as doing a math ➤➤ Memory is the process involved in retaining, retrieving, and using information
problem? (143) about stimuli, images, events, ideas, and skills after the original information is no
longer present.
◗◗ Do we use the same memory
➤➤ Memory is active any time some past experience has an effect on the way you think
system to remember things we
or behave now or in the future ( Joordens, 2011).
have seen and things we have
heard? (145)
From these definitions, it is clear that memory has to do with the past affecting the present,
and possibly the future. But while these definitions are correct, we need to consider the
various ways in which the past can affect the present to really understand what memory is.
When we do this, we will see that there are many different kinds of memory. With apologies
to the English poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose famous poem to her husband begins
“How do I love thee, let me count the ways,” let’s consider a woman we’ll call Christine as
she describes incidents from her life that illustrate a related question: “How do I remember
thee, let me count the ways” (see Figure 5.1).
My first memory of you was brief and dramatic. It was the Fourth of July, and everyone
was looking up at the sky to see the fireworks. But what I saw was your face—illuminated

➤ Figure 5.1  Five types of memory

described by Christine. See text for Chapter 5 Chapters 6, 7, 8
details.
Short-term Long-term episodic

Picnic

Long-term
procedural

How to
ride bike
Sensory

Long-term
Flash semantic

130

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 Short-Term and Working Memory   131

for just a moment by a flash, and then there was darkness. But even in the darkness
I held your image in my mind for a moment.
When something is presented briefly, such as a face illuminated by a flash, your perception
continues for a fraction of a second in the dark. This brief persistence of the image, which is
one of the things that makes it possible to perceive movies, is called sensory memory.
Luckily, I had the presence of mind to “accidentally” meet you later so we could ex-
change phone numbers. Unfortunately, I didn’t have my cell phone with me or any-
thing to write with, so I had to keep repeating your number over and over until I could
write it down.
Information that stays in our memory for brief periods, about 10 to 15 seconds if we
don’t repeat it over and over as Christine did, is short-term memory or working memory.
And the rest is history, because I have countless memories of all the things we have
done. I especially remember that crisp fall day when we went bike riding to that place
in the woods where we had a picnic.
Long-term memory is responsible for storing information for long periods of time—
which can extend from minutes to a lifetime. Long-term memories of experiences from
the past, like the picnic, are episodic memories. The ability to ride a bicycle, or do any of
the other things that involve muscle coordination, is a type of long-term memory called
procedural memory.
I must admit, however, that as much as I remember many of the things we have done, I
have a hard time remembering the address of the first apartment we lived in, although,
luckily for me, I do remember your birthday.
Another type of long-term memory is semantic memory—memories of facts such as an
address or a birthday or the names of different objects (“that’s a bicycle”).
We will describe sensory memory and short-term memory in this chapter, we will com-
pare short-term and long-term memory at the beginning of Chapter 6, and then spend the
rest of Chapter 6 plus Chapters 7 and 8 on long-term memory. We will see that although
people often mistakenly use the term “short-term memory” to refer to memory for events
that happened minutes, hours, or even days ago, it is actually much briefer. In Chapter 6
we will note that this misconception about the length of short-term memory is reflected in
how memory loss is described in movies. People also often underestimate the importance
of short-term memory. When I ask my students to create a “top 10” list of what they use
memory for, most of the items come under the heading of long-term memory. The four top
items on their list are the following:
Material for exams
Their daily schedule
Names
Directions to places
Your list may be different, but items from short-term memory rarely make the list, especially
since the Internet and cell phones make it less necessary to repeat phone numbers over and over
to keep them alive in memory. So what is the purpose of sensory and short-term memory?
Sensory memory is important when we go to the movies (more on that soon), but the
main reason for discussing sensory memory is to demonstrate an ingenious procedure for
measuring how much information we can take in immediately, and how much of that infor-
mation remains half a second later.
The purpose of short-term memory will become clearer as we describe its characteristics,
but stop for a moment and answer this question: What are you aware of right now? Some

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 132  CHAPTER 5  Short-Term and Working Memory

material you are reading about memory? Your surroundings? Noise in the background?
Whatever your answer, you are describing what is in short-term memory. Everything you
know or think about at each moment in time is in short-term memory. Thirty seconds from
now your “old” short-term memories may have faded, but new ones will have taken over.
Your “to do” list in long-term memory may be important, but as you are doing each of the
things on your list, you are constantly using your short-term memory. As you will see in this
chapter, short-term memory may be short in duration, but it looms large in importance.
We begin our description of sensory and short-term memory by describing an early and
influential model of memory called the modal model, which places sensory and short-term
memory at the beginning of the process of memory.

The Modal Model of Memory

Remember Donald Broadbent’s (1958) filter model of attention, which introduced
the flow chart that helped usher in the information processing approach to cognition
(Chapter 1, page 14; Chapter 4, page 95). Ten years af-
ter Broadbent introduced his flow diagram for attention,
Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin (1968) introduced
Rehearsal: A control process the flow diagram for memory shown in Figure 5.2, which is
called the modal model of memory. This model proposed
Short- Long- three types of memory:
Sensory
Input term term
memory
memory memory
1. Sensory memory is an initial stage that holds all incom-
ing information for seconds or fractions of a second.
Output 2. Short-term memory (STM) holds five to seven items
for about 15 to 20 seconds. We will describe the charac-
➤ Figure 5.2  Flow diagram for Atkinson and Shiffrin’s (1968) modal teristics of short-term memory in this chapter.
model of memory. This model, which is described in the text, is 3. Long-term memory (LTM) can hold a large amount of
called the modal model because it contains features of many of the information for years or even decades. We will describe
memory models that were being proposed in the 1960s. long-term memory in Chapters 6, 7, and 8.
The types of memory listed above, each of which is in-
dicated by a box in the model, are called the structural features of the model. As we will
see, the short-term memory and long-term memory boxes in this diagram were expanded
by later researchers, who modified the model to distinguish between the different types of
short- and long-term memories. But for now, we take this simpler modal model as our start-
ing point because it illustrates important principles about how different types of memory
operate and interact.
Atkinson and Shiffrin also proposed control processes, which are dynamic processes
associated with the structural features that can be controlled by the person and may dif-
fer from one task to another. An example of a control process that operates on short-term
memory is rehearsal—repeating a stimulus over and over, as you might repeat a telephone
number in order to hold it in your mind after looking it up on the Internet. Rehearsal
is symbolized by the blue arrow in Figure 5.2. Other examples of control processes are
(1) strategies you might use to help make a stimulus more memorable, such as relating the
digits in a phone number to a familiar date in history, and (2) strategies of attention that
help you focus on information that is particularly important or interesting.
To illustrate how the structural features and control processes operate, let’s consider
what happens as Rachel looks up the number for Mineo’s Pizza on the Internet (Figure 5.3).
When she first looks at the screen, all of the information that enters her eyes is registered in
sensory memory (Figure 5.3a). Rachel uses the control process of selective attention to fo-
cus on the number for Mineo’s, so the number enters her short-term memory (Figure 5.3b),
and she uses the control process of rehearsal to keep it there (Figure 5.3c).

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 The Modal Model of Memory   133

All info on screen

enters sensory
memory. Sensory STM LTM

(a)

Focus on 555-5100.
It enters STM.
Sensory STM LTM

(b)

555-5100
555-5100 Rehearsal
555-5100
Rehearse the number
Rehearsing to keep it in STM while
making the phone call. Sensory STM LTM

Remember number
to make call
(c)

Storage
Store number in LTM.
Memorizing
Sensory STM LTM

(d)

555-5100
Awareness
Retrieve number from LTM.
Retrieval It goes back to STM and is
remembered. Sensory STM LTM

Retrieval
Remember number
to make call again
(e)

➤ Figure 5.3  What happens in different parts of Rachel’s memory as she is (a, b) looking up
the phone number, (c) calling the pizza shop, and (d) memorizing the number. A few days
later, (e) she retrieves the number from long-term memory to order pizza again. The parts
of the modal model that are outlined in red indicate which processes are activated for each
action that Rachel takes.

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 134  CHAPTER 5  Short-Term and Working Memory

Rachel knows she will want to use the number again later, so she decides that in addi-
tion to storing the number in her cell phone, she is going to memorize the number so it will
also be stored in her mind. The process she uses to memorize the number, which involves
control processes that we will discuss in Chapter 6, transfers the number into long-term
memory, where it is stored (Figure 5.3d). The process of storing the number in long-term
memory is called encoding. A few days later, when Rachel’s urge for pizza returns, she re-
members the number. This process of remembering information that is stored in long-term
memory is called retrieval (Figure 5.3e).
One thing that becomes apparent from our example is that the components of memory
do not act in isolation. Thus, the phone number is first stored in Rachel’s STM, but because
information is easily lost from STM (as when you forget a phone number), Rachel transfers
the phone number into LTM (green arrow), where it is held until she needs it later. When
she then remembers the phone number later, it is returned to STM (black arrow), and
Rachel becomes aware of the phone number. We will now consider each component of the
model, beginning with sensory memory.

Sensory Memory
Sensory memory is the retention, for brief periods of time, of the effects of sensory
stimulation. We can demonstrate this brief retention for the effects of visual stimula-
tion with two familiar examples: the trail left by a moving sparkler and the experience
of seeing a film.

The Sparkler’s Trail and the Projector’s Shutter

It is dark out on the Fourth of July, and you put a match to the tip of a sparkler. As sparks
begin radiating from the tip, you sweep the sparkler through the air, creating a trail of light
(Figure 5.4a). Although it appears that this trail is created by light left by the sparkler as
you wave it through the air, there is, in fact, no light along this trail. The lighted trail is a
creation of your mind, which retains a perception of the sparkler’s light for a fraction of a
second (Figure 5.4b). This retention of the perception of light in your mind is called the
persistence of vision.
Persistence of vision is the continued perception of a visual stimulus even after it is
no longer present. This persistence lasts for only a fraction of a second, so it isn’t obvious
in everyday experience when objects are present for long periods. However, the persistence
of vision effect is noticeable for brief stimuli, like the moving sparkler or rapidly flashed
pictures in a movie theater.
While you are watching a movie, you may see actions moving smoothly across the
screen, but what is actually projected is quite different. First, a single film frame is posi-
tioned in front of the projector lens, and when the projector’s shutter opens and closes,
the image on the film frame flashes onto the screen. When the shutter is closed, the film
moves on to the next frame, and during that time the screen is dark. When the next frame
has arrived in front of the lens, the shutter opens and closes again, flashing the next image
onto the screen. This process is repeated rapidly, 24 times per second, with 24 still images
flashed on the screen every second and each image followed by a brief period of dark-
ness (see Table 5.1). (Note that some filmmakers are now beginning to experiment with
higher frame rates, as in Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012), shot
at 48 frames per second, and Ang Lee’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (2016), shot at
120 frames per second.) A person viewing the film doesn’t see the dark intervals between
the images because the persistence of vision fills in the darkness by retaining the image of
the previous frame.

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 Sensory Memory   135

➤ Figure 5.4  (a) A sparkler can

cause a trail of light when it is
moved rapidly. (b) This trail occurs
because the perception of the light
is briefly held in the mind.

Gordon Langsbury/Alamy Stock Photo

Perceptual
trail

TABLE 5.1
Persistence of Vision in Film*
What Is on the What Do You
What Happens? Screen? Perceive?

Film frame 1 is projected. Picture 1 Picture 1

Shutter closes and film moves to the next frame. Darkness Picture 1 (persistence
of vision)

Shutter opens and film frame 2 is projected. Picture 2 Picture 2

*The sequence indicated here is for movies projected using traditional film. Newer digital movie technologies are based on
information stored on discs.

Sperling’s Experiment: Measuring the Capacity

and Duration of the Sensory Store
The persistence of vision effect that adds a trail to our perception of moving sparklers and
fills in the dark spaces between frames in a film has been known since the early days of
psychology (Boring, 1942). But George Sperling (1960) wondered how much information
people can take in from briefly presented stimuli. He determined this in a famous experi-
ment in which he flashed an array of letters, like the one in Figure 5.5a, on the screen for
50 milliseconds (50/1000 second) and asked his participants to report as many of the letters
as possible. This part of the experiment used the whole report method; that is, participants
were asked to report as many letters as possible from the entire 12-letter display. Given
this task, they were able to report an average of 4.5 out of the 12 letters.
At this point, Sperling could have concluded that because the exposure was brief, par-
ticipants saw only an average of 4.5 of the 12 letters. However, some of the participants in
Sperling’s experiment reported that they had seen all the letters, but that their perception
had faded rapidly as they were reporting the letters, so by the time they had reported 4 or
5 letters, they could no longer see or remember the other letters.
Sperling reasoned that if participants couldn’t report the 12-letter display because of
fading, perhaps they would do better if they were told to just report the letters in a single
4-letter row. Sperling devised the partial report method to test this idea. Participants saw

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 136  CHAPTER 5  Short-Term and Working Memory

the 12-letter display for 50 ms, as before, but immediately after it was flashed, they heard a
tone that told them which row of the matrix to report. A high-pitched tone indicated the
top row; a medium-pitch indicated the middle row; and a low-pitch indicated the bottom
row (Figure 5.5b).
Because the tones were presented immediately after the letters were turned off, the par-
ticipant’s attention was directed not to the actual letters, which were no longer present, but
to whatever trace remained in the participant’s mind after the letters were turned off. When
the participants focused their attention on one of the rows, they correctly reported an
average of about 3.3 of the 4 letters (82 percent) in that row. Because this occurred no mat-
ter which row they were reporting, Sperling concluded that immediately after the 12-letter
display was presented, participants saw an average of 82 percent of all of the letters but were
not able to report all of these letters because they rapidly faded as the initial letters were
being reported.
Sperling then did an additional experiment to determine the time course of this fad-
ing. For this experiment, Sperling devised a delayed partial report method in which the
letters were flashed on and off and then the cue tone was presented after a short delay
(Figure 5.5c). The result of the delayed partial report experiments was that when the cue

➤ Figure 5.5  Procedure for three of

Sperling’s (1960) experiments.
(a) Whole report method: Person X F
saw all 12 letters at once for D Z
50 ms and reported as many as he C
or she could remember. (b) Partial X M L T
report: Person saw all 12 letters, as A F N B
before, but immediately after they C D Z P
were turned off, a tone indicated
which row the person was to
report. (c) Delayed partial report: (a) Whole report Result: average of 4.5 letters reported out of 12
Same as (b), but with a short delay
between extinguishing the letters
and presentation of the tone.
X M
X M L T High L
A F N B Medium
C D Z P Low

Immediate tone

(b) Partial report Result: average of 3.3 letters reported out of 4

Tone immediate

B
X M L T High
A F N B Medium
C D Z P Low

Delayed tone
Delay

(c) Partial report Result: average of 1 letter reported out of 4,

Tone delayed after 1-sec delay

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 Short-Term Memory : Storage   137

100
letters available to participant

75
Partial
report Whole
Percentage of

report
50

25

0
0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1.0
Delay of tone (sec)

➤ Figure 5.6  Results of Sperling’s (1960) partial report experiments. The decrease in
performance is due to the rapid decay of iconic memory (sensory memory in the
modal model).

tones were delayed for 1 second after the flash, participants were able to report only slightly
more than 1 letter in a row. Figure 5.6 plots this result, showing the percentage of letters
available to the participants from the entire display as a function of time following presen-
tation of the display. This graph indicates that immediately after a stimulus is presented, all
or most of the stimulus is available for perception. This is sensory memory. Then, over the
next second, sensory memory fades.
Sperling concluded from these results that a short-lived sensory memory registers all
or most of the information that hits our visual receptors, but that this information decays
within less than a second. This brief sensory memory for visual stimuli, called iconic
memory or the visual icon (icon means “image”), corresponds to the sensory memory stage
of Atkinson and Shiffrin’s modal model. Other research using auditory stimuli has shown
that sounds also persist in the mind. This persistence of sound, called echoic memory, lasts
for a few seconds after presentation of the original stimulus (Darwin et al., 1972). An exam-
ple of echoic memory is when you hear someone say something, but you don’t understand
at first and say “What?” But even before the person can repeat what was said, you “hear” it
in your mind. If that has happened to you, you’ve experienced echoic memory. In the next
section, we consider the second stage of the modal model, short-term memory, which also
holds information briefly, but for much longer than sensory memory.

Short-Term Memory: Storage

We saw in the preceding section that although sensory memory fades rapidly, Sperling’s par-
ticipants could report some of the letters. These letters are the part of the stimuli that has
moved on to short-term memory in the flow diagram in Figure 5.2. Short-term memory
(STM) is the system involved in storing small amounts of information for a brief period of
time (Baddeley et al., 2009). Thus, whatever you are thinking about right now, or remember
from what you have just read, is in your short-term memory. As we will see below, most of
this information is eventually lost, and only some of it reaches the more permanent store of
long-term memory (LTM).
Because of the brief duration of STM, it is easy to downplay its importance com-
pared to LTM, but, as we will see, STM is responsible for a great deal of our mental life.

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 138  CHAPTER 5  Short-Term and Working Memory

Everything we think about or know at a particular moment in time involves STM because
short-term memory is our window on the present. (Remember from Figure 5.3e that Ra-
chel became aware of the pizzeria’s phone number by transferring it from LTM, where it was
stored, back into her STM.) We will now describe some early research on STM that focused
on answering the following two questions: (1) What is the duration of STM? (2) What is
the capacity of STM? These questions were answered in experiments that used the method
of recall to test memory.

METHOD  Recall
Most of the experiments we will be describing in this chapter involve recall, in which
participants are presented with stimuli and then, after a delay, are asked to report
back as many of the stimuli as possible. Memory performance can be measured as
a percentage of the stimuli that are remembered. (For example, studying a list of
10 words and later recalling 3 of them is 30 percent recall.) Participants’ responses can
also be analyzed to determine whether there is a pattern to the way items are recalled.
(For example, if participants are given a list consisting of types of fruits and models of
cars, their recall can be analyzed to determine whether they grouped cars together
and fruits together as they were recalling them.) Recall is also involved when a person
is asked to recollect life events, such as graduating from high school, or to recall facts
they have learned, such as the capital of Nebraska.

What Is the Duration of Short-Term Memory?

One of the major misconceptions about short-term memory is that it lasts for a rel-
atively long time. It is not uncommon for people to refer to events they remember
from a few days or weeks ago as being remembered from short-term memory. However,
short-term memory, as conceived by cognitive psychologists, lasts 15 to 20 seconds or
less. This was demonstrated by John Brown (1958) in England and Lloyd Peterson and
Margaret Peterson (1959) in the United States, who used the method of recall to de-
termine the duration of STM. Peterson and Peterson presented participants with three
letters, such as FZL or BHM, followed by a number, such as 403. Participants were
instructed to begin counting backwards by threes from that number. This was done to
keep participants from rehearsing the letters. After intervals ranging from 3 to 18 sec-
onds, participants were asked to recall the three letters. Participants correctly recalled
about 80 percent of the three letter groups when they had counted for only 3 seconds,
but recalled only about 12 percent of the groups after counting for 18 seconds. Results
such as this have led to the conclusion that the effective duration of STM (when re-
hearsal is prevented, as occurred when counting backwards) is about 15 to 20 seconds
or less (Zhang & Luck, 2009).

How Many Items Can Be Held in Short-Term Memory?

Not only is information lost rapidly from STM, but there is a limit to how much informa-
tion can be held there. As we will see, estimates for how many items can be held in STM
range from four to nine.

Digit Span  One measure of the capacity of STM is provided by the digit span—the
number of digits a person can remember. You can determine your digit span by doing the
following demonstration.

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 Short-Term Memory : Storage   139

D E M O N S T R AT I O N   Digit Span
Using an index card or piece of paper, cover all of the numbers below. Move the card
down to uncover the first string of numbers. Read the first set of numbers once, cover
it up, and then write the numbers down in the correct order. Then move the card to
the next string, and repeat this procedure until you begin making errors. The longest
string you are able to reproduce without error is your digit span.
2149

39678

649784

7382015

84264132

482392807

5852984637

If you succeeded in remembering the longest string of digits, you have a digit span of
10 or perhaps more.

According to measurements of digit span, the average capacity of STM is about five
to nine items—about the length of a phone number. This idea that the limit of STM is
somewhere between five and nine was suggested by George Miller (1956), who summa-
rized the evidence for this limit in his paper “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus
Two,” described in Chapter 1 (page 15).
Change Detection  More recent measures of STM capacity have set the limit at about
four items (Cowan, 2001). This conclusion is based on the results of experiments like one
by Steven Luck and Edward Vogel (1997), which measured the capacity of STM by using a
procedure called change detection.

METHOD  Change Detection

Following the “Change Detection” demonstration on page 117, we described ex-
periments in which two pictures of a scene were flashed one after the other and the
participants’ task was to determine what had changed between the first and second
pictures. The conclusion from these experiments was that people often miss changes
in a scene.
Change detection has also been used with simpler stimuli to determine how
much information a person can retain from a briefly flashed stimulus. An example of
change detection is shown in Figure 5.7, which shows stimuli like the ones used in
Luck and Vogel’s experiment. The display on the left was flashed for 100 ms, followed
by 900 ms of darkness and then the new display on the right. The participant’s task
was to indicate whether the second display was the same as or different from the
first. (Notice that the color of one of the squares is changed in the second display.)
This task is easy if the number of items is within the capacity of STM (Figure 5.7a)
but becomes harder when the number of items becomes greater than the capacity
of STM (Figure 5.7b).

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 140  CHAPTER 5  Short-Term and Working Memory

100

Percent correct
100 ms 900 ms delay 2,000 ms 75
(a) Same or different?

50
0 4 8 12
Number of squares
100 ms 900 ms delay 2,000 ms
(b) Same or different?
➤ Figure 5.8  Result of Luck and Vogel’s (1997) experiment, showing
that performance began to decrease once there were four squares
➤ Figure 5.7  (a) Stimuli used by Luck and Vogel (1997). The in the display.
participant sees the first display and then indicates whether
(Source: Adapted from E. K. Vogel, A. W. McCollough, & M. G. Machizawa,
the second display is the same or different. In this example, Neural measures reveal individual differences in controlling access to working
the color of one square is changed in the second display. memory, Nature, 438, 500–503, 2005.)
(b) Luck and Vogel stimuli showing a larger number of items.
(Source: Adapted from E. K. Vogel, A. W. McCollough, & M. G. Machizawa,
Neural measures reveal individual differences in controlling access to
working memory, Nature, 438, 500–503, 2005.)

The result of Luck and Vogel’s experiment, shown in Figure 5.8, indicates that per-
formance was almost perfect when there were one to three squares in the arrays, but that
performance began decreasing when there were four or more squares. Luck and Vogel con-
cluded from this result that participants were able to retain about four items in their short-
term memory. Other experiments, using verbal materials, have come to the same conclusion
(Cowan, 2001).
These estimates of either four or five times to nine items set rather low limits on the
capacity of STM. If our ability to hold items in memory is so limited, how is it possible
to hold many more items in memory in some situations, as when words are arranged in a
sentence? The answer to this question was proposed by George Miller, who introduced the
idea of chunking in his “Seven, Plus or Minus Two” paper.
Chunking  Miller (1956) introduced the concept of chunking to describe the fact that
small units (like words) can be combined into larger meaningful units, like phrases, or even
larger units, like sentences, paragraphs, or stories. Consider, for example, trying to remem-
ber the following words: monkey, child, wildly, zoo, jumped, city, ringtail, young. How many
units are there in this list? There are eight words, but if we group them differently, they can
form the following four pairs: ringtail monkey, jumped wildly, young child, city zoo. We can
take this one step further by arranging these groups of words into one sentence: The ringtail
monkey jumped wildly for the young child at the city zoo.
A chunk has been defined as a collection of elements that are strongly associated with
one another but are weakly associated with elements in other chunks (Cowan, 2001; Gobet
et al., 2001). In our example, the word ringtail is strongly associated with the word monkey
but is not as strongly associated with the other words, such as child or city.
Thus, chunking in terms of meaning increases our ability to hold information in STM.
We can recall a sequence of 5 to 8 unrelated words, but arranging the words to form a mean-
ingful sentence so that the words become more strongly associated with one another
increases the memory span to 20 words or more (Butterworth et al., 1990). Chunking of a
series of letters is illustrated by the following demonstration.

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 Short-Term Memory : Storage   141

D E M O N S T R AT I O N   Remembering Letters
Read the string of letters below at a rate of about one letter every second; then cover
the letters and write down as many as you can, in the correct order.
BCIFCNCASIBB

How did you do? This task isn’t easy, because it involves remembering a series of
12 individual letters, which is larger than the usual letter span of 5 to 9.
Now try remembering the following sequence of letters in order:
CIAFBINBCCBS

How did your performance on this list compare to the one above?

Although the second list has the same letters as the first group, it was easier to remem-
ber if you realized that this sequence consists of the names of four familiar organizations.
You can therefore create four chunks, each of which is meaningful, and therefore easy to
remember.
K. Anders Ericsson and coworkers (1980) demonstrated an effect of chunking by show-
ing how a college student with average memory ability was able to achieve amazing feats
of memory. Their participant, S.F., was asked to repeat strings of random digits that were
read to him. Although S.F. had a typical memory span of 7 digits, after extensive training
(230 one-hour sessions), he was able to repeat sequences of up to 79 digits without error.
How did he do it? S.F. used chunking to recode the digits into larger units that formed
meaningful sequences. S.F. was a runner, so some of the sequences were running times. For
example, 3,492 became “3 minutes and 49 point 2 seconds, near world-record mile time.”
He also used other ways to create meaning, so 893 became “89 point 3, very old man.” This
example illustrates an interaction between STM and LTM, because S.F created some of his
chunks based on his knowledge of running times that were stored in LTM.
Chunking enables the limited-capacity STM system to deal with the large amount of
information involved in many of the tasks we perform every day, such as chunking letters
into words as you read this, remembering the first three numbers of familiar telephone ex-
changes as a unit, and transforming long conversations into smaller units of meaning.

How Much Information Can Be Held in Short-Term Memory?

The idea that the capacity of short-term memory can be specified as a number of items,
as described in the previous section, has generated a great deal of research. But some re-
searchers have suggested that rather than describing memory capacity in terms of “number
of items,” it should be described in terms of “amount of information.” When referring to
visual objects, information has been defined as visual features or details of the object that
are stored in memory (Alvarez & Cavanagh, 2004).
We can understand the reasoning behind the idea that information is important by
considering storing pictures on a computer flash drive. The number of pictures that can be
stored depends on the size of the drive and on the size of the pictures. Fewer large pictures,
which have files that contain more detail, can be stored because they take up more space in
memory.
With this idea in mind, George Alvarez and Patrick Cavanagh (2004) did an exper-
iment using Luck and Vogel’s change detection procedure. But in addition to colored
squares, they also used more complex objects like the ones in Figure 5.9a. For example, for
the shaded cubes, which were the most complex stimuli, a participant would see a display
containing a number of different cubes, followed by a blank interval, followed by a display

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 142  CHAPTER 5  Short-Term and Working Memory

➤ Figure 5.9  (a) Some of the stimuli

used in Alvarez and Cavanagh’s Colored 5
(2004) change detection experiment. squares
The stimuli range from low 4
information (colored squares) to
Chinese
high information (cubes). In the

Capacity
characters 3
actual experiments, there were six
different objects in each set. 2
(b) Results showing the average Random
number of objects that could be polygons 1
remembered for each type
of stimulus. 0
(Source: Adapted from G. A. Alvarez & P. Shaded
cubes
Cavanagh, The capacity of visual short-term
memory is set both by visual information
load and by number of objects, Psychological (a) (b)
Science, 15, 106–111, 2004.)

that was either the same as the first one or in which one of the cubes was different. The par-
ticipant’s task was to indicate whether the two displays were the same or different.
The result, shown in Figure 5.9b, was that participants’ ability to make the same/dif-
ferent judgment depended on the complexity of the stimuli. Memory capacity for the col-
ored squares was 4.4, but capacity for the cubes was only 1.6. Based on this result, Alvarez
and Cavanagh concluded that the greater the amount of information in an image, the fewer
items that can be held in visual short-term memory.
Should short-term memory capacity be measured in terms of “number of items” (Awh
et al., 2007; Fukuda et al., 2010; Luck & Vogel, 1997) or “amount of detailed information”
(Alvaraz & Cavanagh, 2004; Bays & Husain, 2008; Brady et al., 2011)? There are experi-
ments that argue for both ideas, and the discussion among researchers is continuing. There
is, however, agreement that whether considering items or information, there are limits on
how much information we can store in short-term memory.
Our discussion of STM up to this point has focused on two properties: how long infor-
mation is held in STM and how much information can be held in STM. Considering STM
in this way, we could compare it to a container like a leaky bucket that can hold a certain
amount of water for a limited amount of time. But as research on STM progressed, it be-
came apparent that the concept of STM as presented in the modal model was too narrow
to explain many research findings. The problem was that STM was described mainly as a
short-term storage mechanism. As we will see next, more goes on in short-term memory
than storage. Information doesn’t just sit in STM; it can be manipulated in the service of
mental processes such as computation, learning, and reasoning.

T E ST YOUR SELF 5.1

1. The chapter began with Christine’s descriptions of five different types of memory.
What are these? Which are of short duration? Of long duration? Why is short-
term memory important?
2. Describe Atkinson and Shiffrin’s modal model of memory both in terms of its
structure (the boxes connected by arrows) and the control processes. Then
describe how each part of the model comes into play when you decide you want
to order pizza but can’t remember the pizzeria’s phone number.
3. Describe sensory memory and Sperling’s experiment in which he briefly flashed
an array of letters to measure the capacity and duration of sensory memory.

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 Working Memory : Manipulating Information   143

4. How did Peterson and Peterson measure the duration of STM? What is the
approximate duration of STM?
5. What is the digit span? What does this indicate about the capacity of STM?
6. Describe Luck and Vogel’s change detection experiment. What is the capacity of
STM according to the results of this experiment?
7. What is chunking? What does it explain?
8. What two proposals have been made about how the capacity of short-term
memory should be measured? Describe Alvarez and Cavanagh’s experiment and
their conclusion.

Working Memory: Manipulating Information

Working memory, which was introduced in a paper by Baddeley and Hitch (1974), is de-
fined as “a limited-capacity system for temporary storage and manipulation of information
for complex tasks such as comprehension, learning, and reasoning.” The italicized portion of
this definition is what makes working memory different from the old modal model concep-
tion of short-term memory.
Short-term memory is concerned mainly with storing information for a brief period of
time (for example, remembering a phone number), whereas working memory is concerned
with the manipulation of information that occurs during complex cognition (for example,
remembering numbers while reading a paragraph). We can understand the idea that work-
ing memory is involved with the manipulation of information by considering a few exam-
ples. First, let’s listen in on a conversation Rachel is having with the pizza shop:
Rachel: “I’d like to order a large pizza with broccoli and mushrooms.”
Reply: “I’m sorry, but we’re out of mushrooms. Would you like to substitute spinach
instead?
Rachel was able to understand the pizza shop’s reply by holding the first sentence, “I’m
sorry, but we’re out of mushrooms,” in her memory while listening to the second sentence,
and then making the connection between the two. If she had remembered only “Would
you like to substitute spinach instead?” she wouldn’t know whether it was being substituted
for the broccoli or for the mushrooms. In this example, Rachel’s short-term memory is be-
ing used not only for storing information but also for active processes like understanding
conversations.
Another example of an active process occurs when we solve even simple math prob-
lems, such as “Multiply 43 times 6 in your head.” Stop for a moment and try this while being
aware of what you are doing in your head.
One way to solve this problem involves the following steps:
Visualize: 43 3 6.
Multiply 3 3 6 5 18.
Hold 8 in memory, while carrying the 1 over to the 4.
Multiply 6 3 4 5 24.
Add the carried 1 to the 24.
Place the result, 25, next to the 8.
The answer is 258.

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 144  CHAPTER 5  Short-Term and Working Memory

It is easy to see that this calculation involves both storage (holding the 8 in memory,
remembering the 6 and 4 for the next multiplication step) and active processes (carrying
the 1, multiplying 6 3 4) at the same time. If only storage were involved, the problem could
not be solved. There are other ways to carry out this calculation, but whatever method you
choose involves both holding information in memory and processing information.
The fact that STM and the modal model do not consider dynamic processes that unfold
over time is what led Baddeley and Hitch to propose that the name working memory, rather
than short-term memory, be used for the short-term memory process. Current researchers
often use both terms, short-term memory and working memory, when referring to the
short-duration memory process, but the understanding is that the function of this process,
whatever it is called, extends beyond just storage.
Returning to Baddeley, one of the things he noticed was that under certain conditions it
is possible to carry out two tasks simultaneously, as illustrated in the following demonstration.

D E M O N S T R AT I O N   Reading Text and Remembering Numbers

Here are four numbers: 7, 1, 4, and 9. Remember them, then cover them and read the
following passage while keeping the numbers in your mind.

Baddeley reasoned that if STM had a limited storage capacity of about the length
of a telephone number, filling up the storage capacity should make it difficult to
do other tasks that depend on STM. But he found that participants could hold
a short string of numbers in their memory while carrying out another task, such
as reading or even solving a simple word problem. How are you doing with this
task? What are the numbers? What is the gist of what you have just read?

According to Atkinson and Shiffrin’s modal model, it should only

Phonological Visuospatial be possible to perform one of these tasks, which should occupy the entire
loop sketch pad STM. But when Baddeley did experiments involving tasks similar to those
Verbal and Central Visual and in the previous demonstration, he found that participants were able to read
auditory executive spatial while simultaneously remembering numbers.
information information
What kind of model can take into account both (1) the dynamic pro-
cesses involved in cognitions such as understanding language and doing
math problems and (2) the fact that people can carry out two tasks simulta-
Baddeley’s working memory model neously? Baddeley concluded that working memory must be dynamic and
must also consist of a number of components that can function separately.
He proposed three components: the phonological loop, the visuospatial sketch
➤ Figure 5.10  Diagram of the three main pad, and the central executive (Figure 5.10).
components of Baddeley and Hitch’s (1974; The phonological loop consists of two components: the phonological
Baddeley, 2000) model of working memory: the store, which has a limited capacity and holds information for only a few
phonological loop, the visuospatial sketch pad, seconds, and the articulatory rehearsal process, which is responsible for
and the central executive. rehearsal that can keep items in the phonological store from decaying. The
phonological loop holds verbal and auditory information. Thus, when you
are trying to remember a telephone number or a person’s name, or to understand what your
cognitive psychology professor is talking about, you are using your phonological loop.
The visuospatial sketch pad holds visual and spatial information. When you form a
picture in your mind or do tasks like solving a puzzle or finding your way around campus,
you are using your visuospatial sketch pad. As you can see from the diagram, the phonolog-
ical loop and the visuospatial sketch pad are attached to the central executive.
The central executive is where the major work of working memory occurs. The central
executive pulls information from long-term memory and coordinates the activity of the
phonological loop and visuospatial sketch pad by focusing on specific parts of a task and

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 Working Memory : Manipulating Information   145

deciding how to divide attention between different

Central executive coordinates
tasks. The central executive is therefore the “traffic verbal and visual information
cop” of the working memory system.
To understand this “traffic cop” function, imagine
you are driving in a strange city, a friend in the passen- Phonological Visuospatial
loop sketch pad
ger seat is reading you directions to a restaurant, and
the car radio is broadcasting the news. Your phonolog-
ical loop is taking in the verbal directions; your sketch
pad is helping you visualize a map of the streets leading
to the restaurant; and your central executive is coordi- Go left
nating and combining these two kinds of information at the
second
(Figure 5.11). In addition, the central executive might corner
be helping you ignore the messages from the radio so
you can focus your attention on the directions. Central executive focuses
We will now describe a number of phenomena attention on relevant message
that illustrate how the phonological loop handles “Good
morning
language, how the visuospatial sketch pad holds visual from Talk
and spatial information, and how the central execu- Radio 93”
tive uses attention to coordinate between the two.

The Phonological Loop ➤ Figure 5.11  Tasks processed by the phonological loop (hearing directions,
listening to the radio) and the visuospatial sketch pad (visualizing the
We will describe three phenomena that support the route) are being coordinated by the central executive. The central executive
idea of a system specialized for language: the phono- also helps the driver ignore the messages from the radio so attention can
logical similarity effect, the word length effect, and be focused on hearing the directions.
articulatory suppression.
Phonological Similarity Effect  The phonological similarity effect is the confusion of
letters or words that sound similar. In an early demonstration of this effect, R. Conrad (1964)
flashed a series of target letters on a screen and instructed his participants to write down the
letters in the order they were presented. He found that when participants made errors, they were
most likely to misidentify the target letter as another letter that sounded like the target. For exam-
ple, “F” was most often misidentified as “S” or “X,” two letters that sound similar to “F,” but was
not as likely to be confused with letters like “E,” that looked like the target. Thus, even though the
participants saw the letters, the mistakes they made were based on the letters’ sounds.
This result fits with our common experience with telephone numbers. Even though
our contact with them is often visual, we usually remember them by repeating their sound
over and over rather than by visualizing what the numbers looked like on the computer
screen (also see Wickelgren, 1965). In present-day terminology, Conrad’s result would
be described as a demonstration of the phonological similarity effect, which occurs when
words are processed in the phonological store part of the phonological loop.
Word Length Effect  The word length effect occurs when memory for lists of words is
better for short words than for long words. Thus, the word length effect predicts that more
words will be recalled from List 1 (below) than from List 2.
List 1:  beast, bronze, wife, golf, inn, limp, dirt, star
List 2:  alcohol, property, amplifier, officer, gallery, mosquito, orchestra, bricklayer
Each list contains eight words, but according to the word length effect, the second list
will be more difficult to remember because it takes more time to pronounce and rehearse
longer words and to produce them during recall (Baddeley et al., 1984). (Note, however,
that some researchers have proposed that the word length effect does not occur under some
conditions; Jalbert et al., 2011; Lovatt et al., 2000, 2002.)

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 146  CHAPTER 5  Short-Term and Working Memory

In another study of memory for verbal material, Baddeley and coworkers (1975) found
that people are able to remember the number of items that they can pronounce in about
1.5–2.0 seconds (also see Schweickert & Boruff, 1986). Try counting out loud, as fast as
you can, for 2 seconds. According to Baddeley, the number of words you can say should be
close to your digit span.
Articulatory Suppression  Another way that the operation of the phonological loop has
been studied is by determining what happens when its operation is disrupted. This occurs
when a person is prevented from rehearsing items to be remembered by repeating an irrele-
vant sound, such as “the, the, the . . .” (Baddeley, 2000; Baddeley et al., 1984; Murray, 1968).
This repetition of an irrelevant sound results in a phenomenon called articulatory
suppression, which reduces memory because speaking interferes with rehearsal. The fol-
lowing demonstration, which is based on an experiment by Baddeley and coworkers (1984),
illustrates this effect of articulatory suppression.

D E M O N S T R AT I O N   Articulatory Suppression
Task 1: Read the following list. Then turn away and recall as many words as you can.
dishwasher, hummingbird, engineering, hospital, homelessness, reasoning
Task 2: Read the following list while repeating “the, the, the . . .” out loud. Then turn
away and recall as many words as you can.
automobile, apartment, basketball, mathematics, gymnasium, Catholicism
Articulatory suppression makes it more difficult to remember the second list be-
cause repeating “the, the, the . . .” overloads the phonological loop, which is respon-
sible for holding verbal and auditory information.

Baddeley and coworkers (1984) found that repeating “the, the, the . . .” not only reduces
the ability to remember a list of words, it also eliminates the word length effect (Figure 5.12a).
According to the word length effect, a list of one-syllable words should be easier to recall than
a list of longer words because the shorter words leave more space in the phonological loop for
rehearsal. However, eliminating rehearsal by saying “the, the, the . . .” removes this advantage for
short words, so both short and long words are lost from the phonological store (Figure 5.12b).

The Visuospatial Sketch Pad

The visuospatial sketch pad handles visual and spatial information and is therefore involved
in the process of visual imagery—the creation of visual images in the mind in the absence
of a physical visual stimulus. The following demonstration illustrates an early visual imagery
experiment by Roger Shepard and Jacqueline Metzler (1971).

D E M O N S T R AT I O N   Comparing Objects
Look at the two pictures in Figure 5.13a and decide, as quickly as possible, whether
they represent two different views of the same object (“same”) or two different objects
(“different”). Also make the same judgment for the two objects in Figure 5.13b.

When Shepard and Metzler measured participants’ reaction time to decide whether pairs
of objects were the same or different, they obtained the relationship shown in Figure 5.14
for objects that were the same. From this function, we can see that when one shape was
rotated 40 degrees compared to the other shape (as in Figure 5.13a), it took 2 seconds to de-
cide that a pair was the same shape. However, for a greater difference caused by a rotation of

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 Working Memory : Manipulating Information   147

➤ Figure 5.12  (a) Saying “the, the,

100 the . . .” abolishes the word length
effect, so there is little difference in
Phonological Visuospatial
Percent correct recall

performance for short words and

loop sketch pad
long words (Baddeley et al., 1984).
(b) Saying “the, the, the . . .” causes
50 this effect by reducing rehearsal in
the, the, the phonological loop.
the . . .

0
Short Long
Reduces rehearsal
words words
advantage for
Articulatory short words
suppression
(a) (b)

4
Reaction time (sec)

(a)
2

0
0 20 40 60 80 100 120 140 160 180
(b) Angular difference (degrees)

➤ Figure 5.13  Stimuli for the “Comparing ➤ Figure 5.14  Results of Shepard and Metzler’s (1971)
Objects” demonstration. See text for details. mental rotation experiment.
(Source: Based on R. N. Shepard & J. Metzler, Mental (Source: Based on R. N. Shepard & J. Metzler, Mental
rotation of three-dimensional objects, Science, 171, rotation of three-dimensional objects, Science, 171, Figures 1a
Figures 1a & b, 701–703, 1971.) & b, 701–703, 1971.)

140 degrees (as in Figure 5.13b), it took 4 seconds. Based on this finding that reaction times
were longer for greater differences in orientation, Shepard and Metzler inferred that partic-
ipants were solving the problem by rotating an image of one of the objects in their mind, a
phenomenon called mental rotation. This mental rotation is an example of the operation of
the visuospatial sketch pad because it involves visual rotation through space.
Another demonstration of the use of visual representation is an experiment by Sergio
Della Sala and coworkers (1999) in which participants were presented with a task like the
one in the following demonstration.

D E M O N S T R AT I O N   Recalling Visual Patterns

Look at the pattern in Figure 5.15 for 3 seconds. Then turn the page and indicate ➤ Figure 5.15  Test pattern for visual
which of the squares in Figure 5.17 need to be filled in to duplicate this pattern. recall test. After looking at this for
3 seconds, turn the page.

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 148  CHAPTER 5  Short-Term and Working Memory

In this demonstration, the patterns are difficult to code verbally, so completing the
pattern depends on visual memory. Della Sala presented his participants with patterns
ranging from small (a 2 3 2 matrix with 2 shaded squares) to large (a 5 3 6 matrix with
15 shaded squares), with half of the squares being shaded in each pattern. He found that
participants were able to complete patterns consisting of an average of 9 shaded squares
before making mistakes.
The fact that it is possible to remember the patterns in Della Sala’s matrix illustrates
the operation of visual imagery. But how could the participants remember patterns con-
sisting of an average of 9 squares? This number is at the high end of Miller’s range of
5 to 9 and is far above the lower estimate of four items for STM from Luck and Vogel’s
experiment (Figure 5.8). A possible answer to this question is that individual squares can
be combined into subpatterns—a form of chunking that could increase the number of
squares remembered.
Just as the operation of the phonological loop is disrupted by interference (articu-
latory suppression, see page 146), so is the visuospatial sketch pad. Lee Brooks (1968)
did some experiments in which he demonstrated how interference can affect the
operation of the visuospatial sketch pad. The following demonstration is based on one
of Brooks’s tasks.

O
D E M O N S T R AT I O N   Holding a Spatial Stimulus in the Mind
This demonstration involves visualizing a large “F” like the one in Figure 5.16, which
has two types of corners, “outside corners” and “inside corners,” two of which are
labeled.
Task 1: Cover Figure 5.16, and while visualizing F in your mind, start at the up-
per-left corner (the one marked with the o), and, moving around the outline of the
F in a clockwise direction in your mind (no looking at the figure!), point to “Out” in
Table 5.2 for an outside corner and “In” for an inside corner. Move your response
down one level in Table 5.2 for each new corner.
➤ Figure 5.16  “F” stimulus for
Task 2: Visualize the F again, but this time, as you move around the outline of the
Holding a Spatial Stimulus in the
Mind demonstration illustrating F in a clockwise direction in your mind, say “Out” if the corner is an outside corner or
outside (O) and inside (I) corners. “In” if it is an inside corner.
Read the directions in the text,
then cover up the F.
(Source: From Brooks, 1968)
Which was easier, pointing to “Out” or “In” or saying “Out” or “In”? Most people find
that the pointing task is more difficult. The reason is that holding the image of the letter
and pointing are both visuospatial tasks, so the visuospatial sketch pad becomes overloaded.
In contrast, saying “Out” or “In” is an articulatory task that is handled by the phonological
loop, so speaking doesn’t interfere with visualizing the F.

The Central Executive

The central executive is the component that makes working memory “work,” because it is
the control center of the working memory system. Its mission is not to store information
but to coordinate how information is used by the phonological loop and visuospatial sketch
pad (Baddeley, 1996).
Baddeley describes the central executive as being an attention controller. It determines
how attention is focused on a specific task, how it is divided between two tasks, and how
it is switched between tasks. The central executive is therefore related to executive atten-
tion, which we introduced in Chapter 4 (p. 123), and it is essential in situations such as
when a person is attempting to simultaneously drive and use a cell phone. In this example,

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 Working Memory : Manipulating Information   149

the executive would be coordinating phonological loop processes TABLE 5.2

(talking on the phone, understanding the conversation) and sketch- Use for Demonstration
pad processes (visualizing landmarks and the layout of the streets,
Corner Point
navigating the car).
One of the ways the central executive has been studied is by 1 OUT IN
assessing the behavior of patients with brain damage. As we will see 2 OUT IN
later in the chapter, the frontal lobe plays a central role in working
3 OUT IN
memory. It is not surprising, therefore, that patients with frontal
lobe damage have problems controlling their attention. A typical 4 OUT IN
behavior of patients with frontal lobe damage is perseveration— 5 OUT IN
repeatedly performing the same action or thought even if it is not
achieving the desired goal. 6 OUT IN
Consider, for example, a problem that can be easily solved by 7 OUT IN
following a particular rule (“Pick the red object”). A person with
8 OUT IN
frontal lobe damage might be responding correctly on each trial, as
long as the rule stays the same. However, when the rule is switched 9 OUT IN
(“Now pick the blue object”), the person continues following the 10 OUT IN
old rule, even when given feedback that his or her responding is
now incorrect. This perseveration represents a breakdown in the
central executive’s ability to control attention.

An Added Component: The Episodic Buffer

We have seen that Baddeley’s three-component model can explain results such as the pho-
nological similarity effect, the word length effect, articulatory suppression, mental rotation,
and how interference affects operation of the visuospatial sketch pad. However, research has
shown that there are some things the model can’t explain. One of those things is that work-
ing memory can hold more than would be expected based on just the phonological loop or
visuospatial sketch pad. For example, people can remember long sentences consisting of as
many as 15 to 20 words. The ability to do this is related to chunking, in which meaningful
units are grouped together (page 140), and it is also related to long-term memory, which
is involved in knowing the meanings of words in the sentence and in relating parts of the ➤ Figure 5.17  Answer matrix for the
sentence to each other based on the rules of grammar. visual recall test. Put a check in
These ideas are nothing new. It has long been known that the capacity of working each square that was darkened in
memory can be increased by chunking and that there is an interchange of information the pattern you just looked at.
between working memory and long-term memory. But Baddeley decided it was neces-
sary to propose an additional component of working memory
to address these abilities. This new component, which he called
Central
the episodic buffer, is shown in Baddeley’s new model of work- executive
ing memory in Figure 5.18. The episodic buffer can store in-
formation (thereby providing extra capacity) and is connected
to LTM (thereby making interchange between working mem-
ory and LTM possible). Notice that this model also shows that Phonological Episodic Visuospatial
the visuospatial sketch pad and phonological loop are linked to loop buffer sketch pad

long-term memory.
The proposal of the episodic buffer represents another step in
the evolution of Baddeley’s model, which has been stimulating re- Long-term memory
search on working memory for more than 40 years since it was first
proposed. If the exact functioning of the episodic buffer seems a
little vague, it is because it is a “work in progress.” Even Baddeley ➤ Figure 5.18  Baddeley’s revised working memory model,
(Baddeley et al., 2009) states that “the concept of an episodic buf- which contains the original three components plus the
fer is still at a very early stage of development” (p. 57). The main episodic buffer.

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 150  CHAPTER 5  Short-Term and Working Memory

“take-home message” about the episodic buffer is that it represents a way of increasing stor-
age capacity and communicating with LTM.

Working Memory and the Brain

The history of research on working memory and the brain has been dominated by one
structure: the prefrontal cortex (PFC) (see Figure 5.19). We will first describe this link
between working memory and the PFC and will then consider research that has expanded
the “brain map” of working memory to include many additional areas.

The Effect of Damage to the Prefrontal Cortex

The classic example of PFC damage causing changes in behavior is the case of Phineas Gage
and the tamping rod (Figure 5.20a). The scene takes place on a railroad track in Vermont on
September 13, 1848, in which Gage was directing a work crew that was blasting rock from
a railway construction project. Unfortunately for Gage, he made a fateful mistake when
he jammed a 3-foot 7-inch long, 1.25-inch-wide iron tamping rod into a hole containing
gunpowder, and an accidental spark ignited the gunpowder and propelled the tamping rod
into this left cheek and out through the top of his head (Figure 5.20b), causing damage to
his frontal lobe (Ratiu et al., 2004).
Amazingly, Gage survived, but reports from the time noted that the accident had
changed Gage’s personality from an upstanding citizen to a person with low impulse
control, poor ability to plan, and poor social skills. Apparently, there is some uncer-
tainty as to the accuracy of these early descriptions of Gage’s behavior (Macmillan,
2002). Nonetheless, reports about Gage, whether accurate or not, gave rise to the idea
that the frontal lobes are involved in a variety of mental functions, including personal-
ity and planning.
Although Gage’s accident and spectacular recovery brought the frontal lobes to peo-
ple’s attention, our present knowledge about the frontal lobe has been deduced from mod-
ern neuropsychological case studies and controlled behavioral and neurophysiological

➤ Figure 5.19  Cross section of

the brain showing some key
structures involved in memory. Amygdala
The discussion of working Frontal lobe
memory focuses on the prefrontal
cortex and the visual cortex. The
hippocampus, amygdala, and
Prefrontal Visual
frontal cortex will be discussed in cortex cortex
Chapters 6 and 7.

Hippocampus

Medial temporal lobe structures

(labeled in blue)

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 Working Memory and the Brain   151

➤ Figure 5.20  (a) Phineas Gage

posing with the tamping rod.

Van Horn JD, Irimia A, Torgerson CM, Chambers MC, Kikinis R, et al. (2012) Mapping Connectivity Damage in the Case
(b) Diagram showing how the
tamping rod went through
Gage’s head.

of Phineas Gage. PLoS ONE 7(5): e37454. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0037454

Paul Fearn/Alamy Stock Photo

(a) (b)

experiments. We’ve noted that damage to the frontal lobe causes problems in controlling
attention, which is an important function of the central executive.
An example of animal research that explored the effect of frontal lobe damage on
memory tested monkeys using the delayed-response task, which required a monkey
to hold information in working memory during a delay period (Goldman-Rakic, 1990,
1992). Figure 5.21 shows the setup for this task. The monkey sees a food reward in
one of two food wells. Both wells are then covered, a screen is lowered, and then there
is a delay before the screen is raised again. When the screen is raised, the monkey must
remember which well had the food and uncover the correct food well to obtain a
reward. Monkeys can be trained to accomplish this task. However, if their PFC is
removed, their performance drops to chance level, so they pick the correct food well
only about half of the time.

Monkey observes food in tray Delay Response

➤ Figure 5.21  The delayed-response task being administered to a monkey.

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 152  CHAPTER 5  Short-Term and Working Memory

This result supports the idea that the PFC is important for holding information for
brief periods of time. In fact, it has been suggested that one reason we can describe the mem-
ory behavior of very young infants as “out of sight, out of mind” (when an object that the
infant can see is then hidden from view, the infant behaves as if the object no longer exists)
is that their frontal and prefrontal cortex do not become adequately developed until about
8 months of age (Goldman-Rakic, 1992).

Prefrontal Neurons That Hold Information

An important characteristic of memory is that it involves delay or waiting. Something
happens, followed by a delay, which is brief for working memory; then, if memory
is successful, the person remembers what has happened. Researchers, therefore, have
looked for physiological mechanisms that hold information about events after they
are over.
Shintaro Funahashi and coworkers (1989) conducted an experiment in which they re-
corded from neurons in a monkey’s PFC while the monkey carried out a delayed-response
task. The monkey first looked steadily at a fixation point, X, while a square was flashed at
one position on the screen (Figure 5.22a). In this example, the square was flashed in the up-
per-left corner (on other trials, the square was flashed at different positions on the screen).
This caused a small response in the neuron.
After the square went off, there was a delay of a few seconds. The nerve firing records
in Figure 5.22b show that the neuron was firing during this delay. This firing is the neural
record of the monkey’s working memory for the position of the square. After the delay, the
fixation X went off. This was a signal for the monkey to move its eyes to where the square

Square
goes off

Eye
movement
Electrical
activity

* * *
(a) Cue (b) During delay (c) Monkey moves eyes

➤ Figure 5.22  Results of an experiment showing the response of neurons in the monkey’s
prefrontal cortex during an attentional task. Neural responding is indicated by an asterisk (*).
(a) A cue square is flashed at a particular position, causing the neuron to respond. (b) The
square goes off, but the neuron continues to respond during the delay. (c) The fixation
X goes off, and the monkey demonstrates its memory for the location of the square by
moving its eyes to where the square was.
(Source: Adapted from S. Funahashi, C. J. Bruce, & P. S. Goldman-Rakic, Mnemonic coding of visual space
in the primate dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, Journal of Neurophysiology, 6, 331–349, 1989.)

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 Working Memory and the Brain   153

had been flashed (Figure 5.22c). The monkey’s ability to do this provides behavioral evi-
dence that it had, in fact, remembered the location of the square.
The key result of this experiment was that Funahashi found neurons that responded
only when the square was flashed in a particular location and that these neurons continued
responding during the delay. For example, some neurons responded only when the square
was flashed in the upper-right corner and then during the delay; other neurons responded
only when the square was presented at other positions on the screen and then during the de-
lay. The firing of these neurons indicates that an object was presented at a particular place,
and this information about the object’s location remains available for as long as these neu-
rons continue firing (also see Funahashi, 2006).

The Neural Dynamics of Working Memory

The idea that information can be held in working memory by neural activity that
continues across a time gap, as in Figure 5.22b, fits with the idea that neural firing
transmits information in the nervous system. But some researchers have proposed that
information can be held during the delay by a mechanism that doesn’t involve contin-
uous firing.
One idea, proposed by Mark Stokes (2015), is that information can be stored by
short-term changes in neural networks, as shown in Figure 5.23. Figure 5.23a shows
the activity state, in which information to be remembered causes a number of neurons,
indicated by the dark circles, to briefly fire. This firing doesn’t continue, but causes
the synaptic state, shown in Figure 5.23b, in which a number of connections between
neurons, indicated by the darker lines, are strengthened. These changes in connectivity,
which Stokes calls activity-silent working memory, last only a few seconds, but that
is long enough for working memory. Finally, when the memory is being retrieved, the
memory is indicated by the pattern of firing in the network, shown by the dark circles
in Figure 5.23c.
Thus, in Stokes’s model, information is held in memory not by continuous nerve fir-
ing but by a brief change in the connectivity of neurons in a network. Other researchers
have proposed other ways of holding information in working memory that don’t require
continuous neural firing (Lundquist et al., 2016; Murray et al., 2017). These models are
based on experiments and computations too complex to describe here, and all are specu-
lative. But the idea that information can be stored in the nervous system by changes in the

Activity state Synaptic state Remembering

Output
Input

➤ Figure 5.23  Diagram showing Stokes’s (2015) proposal that information can be stored
in working memory by changes in the connectivity of a neural network. (a) Activity state,
showing that some neurons in the network (blue circles) are activated by the incoming
stimulus. (b) Synaptic state, showing connections that have been strengthened between
neurons in the network (blue lines). (c) Activity associated with the memory.
(Source: Stokes, M. G, ‘Activity-silent’ working memory in prefrontal cortex: a dynamic coding
framework. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19(7), 394–405. Figure 2a, top, p. 397, 2015.)

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 154  CHAPTER 5  Short-Term and Working Memory

connections in neural networks is one of the “hot” topics

of current research on the neural mechanisms of memory
(Kaldy & Sigala, 2017).
Sustained Another current idea about working memory is that
attention it involves physiological processes that extend beyond the
Sustained PFC. It isn’t hard to see why working memory would in-
attention; rehearsal;
volve brain areas in addition to the frontal lobes. Just look
goals Reverberating
signals back at the woman driving the car in Figure 5.11, who is
using her central executive to switch her attention from one
thing to another, which involves visual capacities, as she
Long-term imagines the road layout, and verbal capacities, as she listens
memory to her companion’s directions. Working memory, therefore,
Perception
involves an interplay between a number of areas of the brain.
This interplay is symbolized by the interaction between
brain areas in Figure 5.24, which depicts a network based
on the research on a large number of experiments (Curtis &
Espisoto, 2003; Ericsson et al., 2015; Lee & Baker, 2016;
Riley & Constantinidis, 2016). This idea that a number of
areas of the brain are involved in working memory is an ex-
ample of distributed representation, which we introduced
in Chapter 2 (page 43).
➤ Figure 5.24  Map showing some
of the areas of the brain that are
involved in working memory. This
simplified version of the working
memory structures proposed by
 OMETHING TO CONSIDER: WHY IS MORE
S
Ericsson et al. (2015) indicates not WORKING MEMORY BETTER?
only that a number of areas are
associated with working memory,
Is working memory the same in different people? The answer to this question—that there
but that they communicate with are individual differences in the capacity of people’s working memory—shouldn’t be sur-
each other. prising. After all, people differ in physical capabilities, and it is a common observation that
Source: Ericsson et al., Neurocognitive some people have better memory than others. But researchers’ interest in individual differ-
architecture of working memory, Neuron ences in working memory extends beyond simply demonstrating that differences exist to
88, 33–46. Figure 10d, page 35, 2015.) demonstrating how differences in working memory influence cognitive functioning and
behavior.
Meredyth Daneman and Patricia Carpenter (1980) carried out one of the early ex-
periments on individual differences in working memory capacity by developing a test for
working memory capacity and then determining how individual differences were related to
reading comprehension. The test they developed, the reading span test, required partici-
pants to read a series of 13- to 16-word sentences such as these:
(1) When at last his eyes opened, there was no glimmer of strength, no shade of angle.
(2) The taxi turned up Michigan Avenue where they had a clear view of the lake.
Each sentence was seen briefly as it was being read, then the next sentence was pre-
sented. Immediately after reading the last sentence, the participant was asked to remember
the last word in each sentence in the order that they occurred. The participant’s reading
span was the number of sentences they could read, and then correctly remember all of the
last words.
Participants’ reading spans ranged from 2 to 5, and the size of the reading span was
highly correlated with their performance on a number of reading comprehension tasks and
their verbal SAT score. Daneman and Carpenter concluded that working memory capac-
ity is a crucial source of individual differences in reading comprehension. Other research
has shown that higher working memory capacity is related to better academic performance

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 Working Memory and the Brain   155

(Best & Miller, 2010; Best et al., 2011), better chance of graduating from high school
(Fitzpatrick et al., 2015), the ability to control emotions (Schmeichel et al., 2008), and
greater creativity (De Drue et al., 2012).
But what is it about differences in working memory capacity that results in these
outcomes? Edmund Vogel and coworkers (2005) focused on one component of work-
ing memory: the control of attention by the central executive. They first separated
participants into two groups based on their performance on a test of working memory.
Participants in the high-capacity group were able to hold a number of items in working
memory; participants in the low-capacity group were able to hold fewer items in work-
ing memory.
Participants were tested using the change detection procedure (see Method:
Change Detection, page 139). Figure 5.25a shows the sequence of stimuli: (1) they
first saw a cue indicating whether to direct their attention to the red rectangles on the
left side or the red rectangles on the right side of the displays that followed. (2) They
then saw a memory display for one-tenth of a second followed by (3) a brief blank
screen and then (4) a test display. Their task was to indicate whether the cued red
rectangles in the test display had the same or different orientations than the ones in
the memory display. While they were making this judgment, a brain response called
the event-related potential was measured, which indicated how much space was used in
working memory as they carried out the task.

➤ Figure 5.25  (a) Sequence for

–2 V the Vogel et al. (2005) task. The
arrow in this example tells the
participant to pay attention to
the left side of the memory and
ERP response

test displays. The task is to indicate

Memory Test –1 whether the red rectangles on
Cue Delay
display display
the attended side are the same or
different in the two displays. (b)
+ + + + ERP response for low- and high-
capacity participants for the task
in part (a). (c) Display with blue
0
High Low bars added. These bars are added
Red only
to distract the participants, who
(a) (b) are supposed to be focusing
on the red rectangles. (d) ERP
response for the task in part (c).
–2 V
(Source: Based on E. K. Vogel, A. W.
McCollough, & M. G. Machizawa,
Neural measures reveal individual
differences in controlling access to
ERP response

working memory, Nature, 438, 500–503,

Memory Test 2005.)
Cue Delay –1
display display

+ + + +

0
200 ms 100 ms 900 ms 2,000 ms High Low
Add blue
(c) (d)

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 156  CHAPTER 5  Short-Term and Working Memory

METHOD  Event-Related Potential

The event-related potential (ERP) is recorded with small disc electrodes placed on a
person’s scalp, as shown in Figure 5.26a. Each electrode picks up signals from groups
of neurons that fire together. The event-related potential shown in Figure 5.26b was
recorded as a person was making a judgment in the Vogel experiment. This response
had been shown in other experiments to be related to the number of items placed into
working memory, so a larger ERP response indicates how much capacity was used.

The graph in Figure 5.25b shows the size of the ERP for the red bar only display for the
high- and low-working memory groups. This isn’t a particularly interesting result, because
(a) the size of the ERP is nearly the same for both groups. But Vogel also ran another condition
in which he added some extra blue bars, as shown in Figure 5.25c. These bars were not
–2μV
relevant to the participant’s task so their purpose was to distract the participant’s attention.
If the central executive is doing its job, these extra bars should have no effect, because atten-
tion would remain focused on the red bars. The results in Figure 5.25d show that adding
blue bars caused an increase in the response of the high-capacity group, but caused a larger
–200 200 600 1,000 increase in the response of the low-capacity group.
Time (ms) The fact that adding the blue bars had only a small effect on the response of the high-
(b)
capacity group means that these participants were very efficient at ignoring the distractors,
so the irrelevant blue stimuli did not take up much space in working memory. Because allo-
➤ Figure 5.26  (a) A person wearing cating attention is a function of the central executive, this means that the central executive
electrodes for recording the event- was functioning well for these participants.
related potential (ERP). (b) An
The fact that adding the two blue bars caused a large increase in the response of the
ERP recorded as a participant is
viewing the stimuli. low-capacity group means that these participants were not able to ignore the irrelevant blue
(Source: Courtesy Natasha Tokowicz.)
stimuli, so the blue bars were taking up space in working memory. The central executive of
these participants is not operating as efficiently as the central executives of the high-capacity
participants. Vogel and coworkers concluded from these results that some people’s central
executives are better at allocating attention than others’.
Other experiments have gone one step further and have asked whether high-capacity
participants performed better because they are better at “tuning in” to the important stim-
uli or better at “tuning out” the irrelevant distractor stimuli. The conclusion from these
experiments has generally been that high-capacity participants are better at tuning out the
distractors (Gaspar et al., 2016).
The importance of being able to ignore distracting stimuli highlights the connec-
tion between working memory and cognitive control, which we introduced in Chapter 4
(page 123). Cognitive control has been described as a set of functions, which allow people
to regulate their behavior and attentional resources, and to resist the temptation to give in
to impulses (Fitzpatrick et al., 2015; Garon et al., 2008). People with poor cognitive
control are more easily distracted and are more likely to let these distractions interfere
with ongoing behavior. Another way to describe the behavior of someone with poor
cognitive control is to say that they have difficulty dealing with temptation. Not sur-
prisingly, individual differences in cognitive control are closely related to individual
differences in working memory (Friedman et al., 2011; Hofmann et al., 2012; Kotabe
& Hofmann, 2015).
Stepping back and looking at this chapter from the beginning, we can see that we’ve
come a long way from Atkinson and Shiffrin’s (1968) modal model of memory. The beauty
of that model was that dividing the process of memory into different stages with different
properties led researchers to focus their attention on discovering how each stage works.

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 Working Memory and the Brain   157

The story that has unfolded since the modal model was introduced has involved behavioral
experiments (which led to proposing more stages, as in Baddeley’s model in Figure 5.18),
and physiological experiments (which considered how brief memories are stored in the ner-
vous system).
This chapter has been a “warm up” for what is to come. Chapter 6 continues the idea
of stages of memory and describes research that zooms in on the long-term memory box
of the modal model. We will see how this research distinguished between a number of
different types of long-term memory. Chapter 7 then looks at some of the mechanisms
involved in getting information into and out of long-term memory and returns to physi-
ology to discuss how neurons can store information for periods ranging from minutes to
a lifetime.

T E ST YOUR SELF 5.2

1. Describe two findings that led Baddeley to begin considering alternatives to
the modal model.
2. What are the differences between STM and working memory?
3. Describe Baddeley’s three-component model of working memory.
4. Describe the phonological similarity effect, the word length effect, and the
effect of articulatory suppression. What do these effects indicate about the
phonological loop?
5. Describe the visuospatial sketch pad, the Shepard and Metzler mental
rotation task, Della Sala’s visual pattern task, and Brooks’s “F” task. Be
sure you understand what each task indicates about the visuospatial
sketch pad.
6. What is the central executive? What happens when executive function is lost
because of damage to the frontal lobe?
7. What is the episodic buffer? Why was it proposed, and what are its
functions?
8. What is the connection between Phineas Gage and the frontal cortex?
9. The physiology of working memory has been studied (1) by determining how
removal of the PFC in monkeys affects memory and (2) by recording neural
responses from monkeys. What have these studies taught us about working
memory and the brain?
10. 
How is Stokes’s model of working memory a departure from the idea that there
has to be continuous neural activity during the delay between presenting a
stimulus and remembering it?
11. Describe how Daneman and Carpenter discovered the relationship
between working memory capacity, reading comprehension, and verbal
SAT scores.
12. 
Describe Vogel’s experiment that measured the event-related potential in
participants with high-capacity working memory and those with low-capacity
working memory as they were carrying out a change detection task. What does
the result of this experiment indicate about how the central executive allocated
attention in these two types of participants?
13. 
Do high-capacity working memory participants perform better because they are
better at “tuning in” to relevant stimuli or better at “tuning out” distractors?
14. 
What is self-control, and why would we expect it to be related to working
memory?

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 158  CHAPTER 5  Short-Term and Working Memory

CHAPTER SUMMARY
1. Memory is the process involved in retaining, retrieving, and 10. Shepard and Metzler’s mental rotation experiment
using information about stimuli, images, events, ideas, and illustrates visual imagery, which is one of the functions of
skills after the original information is no longer present. Five the visuospatial sketch pad. Della Sala’s visual recall task
different types of memory are sensory, short-term, episodic, used visual imagery to estimate the capacity of working
semantic, and procedural. memory. Brooks’s “F” experiment showed that two tasks can
2. Atkinson and Shiffrin’s modal model of memory consists be handled simultaneously if one involves the visuospatial
of three structural features: sensory memory, short-term sketch pad and the other involves the phonological loop.
memory, and long-term memory. Another feature of the Performance decreases if one component of working
model is control processes such as rehearsal and attentional memory is called on to deal with two tasks simultaneously.
strategies. 11. The central executive coordinates how information is used
3. Sperling used two methods, whole report and partial report, by the phonological loop and visuospatial sketch pad; it can
to determine the capacity and time course of visual sensory be thought of as an attention controller. Patients with frontal
memory. The duration of visual sensory memory (iconic lobe damage have trouble controlling their attention, as
memory) is less than 1 second, and the duration of auditory illustrated by the phenomenon of perseveration.
sensory memory (echoic memory) is about 2–4 seconds. 12. The working memory model has been updated to include
4. Short-term memory is our window on the present. Brown an additional component called the episodic buffer, which
and Peterson and Peterson determined that the duration of helps connect working memory with LTM and which has a
STM is about 15–20 seconds. greater capacity and can hold information longer than the
phonological loop or the visuospatial sketch pad.
5. Digit span is one measure of the capacity of short-term
memory. According to George Miller’s classic “Seven, Plus 13. Phineas Gage’s accident brought some possible functions of
or Minus Two” paper, the capacity of STM is five to nine the prefrontal cortex to people’s attention.
items. According to more recent experiments, the capacity 14. Behaviors that depend on working memory can be disrupted by
is about four items. The amount of information held in damage to the prefrontal cortex. This has been demonstrated by
STM can be expanded by chunking, in which small units are testing monkeys on the delayed-response task.
combined into larger, more meaningful units. The memory 15. There are neurons in the prefrontal cortex that fire to
performance of the runner S.F. provides an example of presentation of a stimulus and continue firing as this
chunking. stimulus is held in memory.
6. It has been suggested that rather than describing short-term 16. Current research on the physiology of working memory has
memory capacity in terms of number of items, it should be introduced the idea that (a) information can be contained
described in terms of amount of information. An experiment in patterns of neural connectivity and (b) working memory
by Alvarez and Cavanagh, using stimuli ranging from simple involves many areas of the brain.
to complex, supports this idea.
17. Daneman and Carpenter developed a test to measure working
7. Baddeley revised the short-term memory component of memory capacity called the reading span test. Using this test to
the modal model in order to deal with dynamic processes determine individual differences in working memory capacity,
that unfold over time and can’t be explained by a single they found that high-capacity working memory is associated
short-term process. In this new model, working memory with better reading comprehension and higher SAT scores.
replaces STM. Other research has confirmed and extended these findings.
8. Working memory is a limited-capacity system for storage and 18. Vogel and coworkers used the ERP to demonstrate differences
manipulation of information in complex tasks. It consists in how the central executive operates for participants with
of three components: the phonological loop, which holds high- and low-capacity working memory and concluded that
auditory or verbal information; the visuospatial sketch pad, there are differences in people’s ability to allocate attention.
which holds visual and spatial information; and the central Other experiments have shown that people with high-capacity
executive, which coordinates the action of the phonological working memory are better at “tuning out” distractors than
loop and visuospatial sketch pad. people with low-capacity working memory.
9. The following effects can be explained in terms of operation 19. There is a relation between working memory capacity
of the phonological loop: (a) phonological similarity effect, and cognitive control, which is involved in dealing with
(b) word-length effect, and (c) articulatory suppression. temptation.

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 CogLab Experiments   159

THINK ABOUT IT
1. Analyze the following in terms of how the various stages of can’t remember any words from a list when she is tested
the modal model are activated, using Rachel’s pizza-ordering immediately after hearing the words, but her memory gets
experience in Figure 5.3 as a guide: (1) listening to a lecture better when she is tested after a delay. Interestingly enough,
in class, taking notes, and reviewing the notes later as you when the woman reads the list herself, she remembers well
study for an exam; (2) watching a scene in a James Bond at first, so in that case the delay is not necessary. Can you
movie in which Bond captures the female enemy agent explain these observations using the modal model? The
whom he had slept with the night before. working memory model? Can you think of a new model that
2. Adam has just tested a woman who has brain damage, might explain this result better than those two?
and he is having difficulty understanding the results. She

KEY TERMS
Activity-silent working memory, 153 Episodic buffer, 149 Reading span test, 154
Articulatory rehearsal process, 144 Event-related potential (ERP), 156 Recall, 138
Articulatory suppression, 146 Iconic memory, 137 Rehearsal, 132
Central executive, 144 Memory, 130 Sensory memory, 134
Change detection, 139 Mental rotation, 147 Short-term memory (STM),
Chunk, 140 Modal model of memory, 132 137
Chunking, 140 Partial report method, 135 Structural features, 132
Control processes, 132 Perseveration, 149 Visual icon, 137
Decay, 137 Persistence of vision, 134 Visual imagery, 146
Delayed partial report method, 136 Phonological loop, 144 Visuospatial sketch pad, 144
Delayed-response task, 151 Phonological similarity effect, 145 Whole report method, 135
Digit span, 138 Phonological store, 144 Word length effect, 145
Echoic memory, 137 Reading span, 154 Working memory, 143

COGLAB EXPERIMENTS  Numbers in parentheses refer to the experiment number in CogLab.

Modality Effect (17) Sternberg Search (22) Phonological Similarity Effect (26)
Partial Report (18) Irrelevant Speech Effect (23) Word Length Effect (27)
Brown-Peterson Task (20) Memory Span (24) Von Restorff Effect (32)
Position Error (21) Operation Span (25) Neighborhood Size Effect (42)

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 Thomas Barwick/Taxi/Getty Images
Our memories record many different things. This chapter distinguishes between episodic
memory—memories that enable us to “relive” in our mind events that have occurred in our
lives—and semantic memory—memories for facts that don’t depend on remembering specific
events. These women may be able to “relive,” years later, the experience of taking a “selfie” as
well as what the occasion was that brought them together. This is episodic memory. But even if
they were to forget taking the selfie and what happened on that particular day, they would likely
still remember each other, along with characteristics specific to each person. This is semantic
memory. We will see that episodic memory and semantic memory compliment each other and
interact to create the richness of our lives.

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