short-term memory

short-term memory, in psychology, the concept involving the extremely limited number of items that humans are capable of keeping in mind at one time. Of undeniable importance, the long-standing concept of “short-term memory” is one of the most researched topics in cognitive science. Nearly every act of cognition—reasoning, planning, problem solving—relies on one’s ability to store and manipulate information.

The study of short-term memory was revolutionized by the experiments of British psychologist Alan D. Baddeley and his colleagues in the 1970s and ’80s. According to their model, short-term or “working memory” consists of at least two storage buffers: one for visuospatial information and another for verbal information. A unique aspect of their model was its inclusion of a “central executive” (also called “executive attention”) that coordinates the activities of the storage buffers and manipulates information. This newer concept of working memory can be likened to a mental workspace rather than a simple storage device or a conduit into “long-term memory.” The switch in terminology between short-term memory and working memory reflects this belief in the importance of using this mechanism for performing mental work.

Much recent short-term memory research has focused on three issues: (1) Are there truly separable stores for different types of information? (2) What is the nature of the central executive? (3) Do individual differences in short-term memory abilities account for different levels of ability to read, plan, and solve problems?

Storage

Research suggests that there are at least two distinct storage buffers: one for the verbal information and another for visuospatial information. Much of the evidence for this distinction comes from the logic of double dissociation. According to this logic, two cognitive mechanisms (e.g., verbal and spatial short-term memory) are separate if the task performance is differentially impacted by two different variables. For example, performance on verbal working memory tasks (e.g., remember a set of letters), but not spatial working memory tasks (e.g., remembering a set of locations on a computer screen), is impaired by having to say a syllable or word repeatedly (e.g., “the, the, the”) during a memory delay. This is presumably because having to repeat the word or syllable prevents people from silently rehearsing the to-be-remembered letters, a common tactic known as subvocal rehearsal. Conversely, being required to tap a set of computer keys in a spatial pattern interferes with memory for a set of locations in space, but not with memory for a set of letters. Taken together, this set of findings implies that verbal and spatial short-term memory rely on different pools of cognitive resources.

Psychologists Patricia A. Reuter-Lorenz and Andrea C. Miller used the logic of double dissociation to determine whether verbal and spatial short-term memory rely on different neural mechanisms by testing a patient who had undergone a callosotomy (split-brain) procedure. They found that when the verbal variant of the task was presented to the left hemisphere, performance was markedly superior to when the verbal task was presented to the right hemisphere. The opposite was true when the spatial task was presented to the right hemisphere. These findings were bolstered by data from neuroimaging and patient studies of the division between verbal and spatial information, which found that verbal tasks are mediated largely by left hemisphere neural regions, whereas the spatial task are relatively largely right lateralized.

The central executive

In the original working memory model of Baddeley and Graham Hitch, the central executive was the least developed component, prompting a great deal of interest in trying to characterize this mechanism. Some researchers have proposed that it coordinates and controls various subparts of the system. Such a conceptualization is consistent with a number of different computational models, in that many major architectures contain a mechanism that determines whether goals and subgoals are being met and strategically schedules the initiation of various processes. Others have conceptualized executive function as a collection of processes that serve to manipulate the contents of working memory, including inhibition, attention, and temporal ordering.

Individual differences and development

One thing that appears to distinguish earlier ideas of short-term memory from working memory is that performance on tasks involving just the short-term storage of information does not predict how well people will perform on higher-order reasoning skills, whereas performance on tasks involving both the simultaneous storage and manipulation of information in memory predicts a host of cognitive skills. For instance, it has been shown that working memory capacity, as defined by the ability to simultaneously store and process information, predicts reading comprehension skill. Working memory capacity also predicts how well people will perform on problem-solving tasks, such as conditional reasoning problems. Thus, it appears that working memory capacity can account for many of the skills that constitute intelligence.

From a developmental perspective, working memory is critical because it may play a role in learning language, particularly in vocabulary acquisition. Furthermore, just as working memory capacity can predict performance on higher-order cognitive tasks, working memory ability has been hypothesized to play a role in diverse childhood and adult maladies such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, mathematical disabilities, and reading disabilities. Furthermore, children of school age in cultures in which the articulation time to numbers or letters is shorter (e.g., Chinese, as compared with German) show a greater memory capacity earlier in development. This is because verbal memory is language-based and limited not just by the number of items but also by how long it takes to utter them.

Just as important cognitive skills appear to develop with the help of working memory in childhood, working memory declines in older adults appear to be a factor in age-related changes in a range of cognitive tasks. Adults reach their peak working memory capacity in their twenties, conveniently coinciding with the college years for many, then decline steadily over the life span into old age.