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Recent studies by Jones (1974) have posited that accurate movements in short-term motor memory (STMM) are mediated by the subject's ability to preset effector mechanisms and monitor their efferent output. Three experiments were conducted to examine this hypothesis. Experiment 1 involved comparisons between the reproduction of the end-location and the reproduction of the distance of a preselected movement. The results revealed that preselected location was superior to preselected distance, indicating that the efference attached to movement extent was not primary. Experiment 2 examined whether location cues were primarily encoded independent of the movement presentation mode. The subjects recalled target locations under preselected, constrained, and passive movement conditions. Recall in the preselected condition was superior to that in the constrained and passive conditions, which showed no difference, suggesting that afferent location information per se was not totally responsible for recall accuracy. Experiment 3 examined the processing requirements of preselected, constrained, and passive location information by filling the retention interval with interpolated processing activity. While preselected location was clearly superior, the three conditions were not differentially affected by processing activity. These overall findings were interpreted as contrary to Jones (1974) and pointed to the importance of preselection in short-term motor memory.

Ten alcoholic Korsakoff patients and ten alcoholic control subjects were given several short-term memory, distractor type tasks in which consonant trigrams (verbal) and random shapes (nonverbal) were employed as the to-be-retained materials. The Korsakoff patients demonstrated a severe verbal memory deficit when the retention interval was filled with verbal distractor activity, but their retention of the same verbal material was intact when a nonverbal distractor task was used. In contrast, the Korsakoff patients' retention of nonverbal material was impaired regardless of the nature of the distractor activity. In fact, their retention of nonverbal material was impaired even when an unfilled retention interval was used.

Two experiments used a selective interference procedure in an attempt to determine whether nonverbal visual stimuli were represented in memory in a verbal or spatial format. A spatial representation was clearly implicated. In both experiments, Ss were required to remember either the positions or the identities of seven target items in a 25-item array. During the retention interval for that information, Ss attempted to recognize schematic face or airplane photograph stimuli in a same-different memory task. Memory performance on one or both tasks was greatly impaired when the recall task involved position or spatial information, but was either much less or not at all affected by an identity or verbal information recall task. Because of the selective nature of the interference and on the basis of certain correlational evidence, the experimental results were also interpreted as providing support for the notion that verbal and spatial information are stored and processed in separate information-processing systems.

The present study investigated developmental changes in the lateralized effects of concurrent cognitive activity on the performance of a manual task. Children aged 9, 10, 11 and 12 years were required to press a key continuously for 15 sec whilst at the same time engaging in three conditions involving cognitive activity (spatial, verbal and mixed spatial-verbal probelem solving) and a control condition. The nature of the concurrent cognitive activity was found to produce differential effects on left- and righthand performance with spatial-cognitive activity being a more effective disruptor of an ongoing, left-handed manual task at the age of 9 years. Above that age verbal and spatial activity appear to have comparable disruptive effects.

Summary.-A 4 X 4 factorial design with repeated measures across retention intervals and instructions was employed to determine the effect of instruction on recall ability of movement information from short-term motor memory. Each of the 16 Ss received all 16 possible treatment combinations. While both retention interval and instruction showed significant effects, there was no significant interaction. The reverse-order instruction was affected by the length of the retention interval while the no-prior-item, last-distance, and drop instructions were uninfluenced. No evidence supported the trace-decay hypothesis of forgetting. Ss seem easily able to remove information from memory or ignore information input so it is not represented in memory. The variables which affect short-term retention of verbal material apparently are not as influential in affecting short-term memory of movement information and vice versa. The evidence in verbal short-term memory (Keppel & Underwood, 1962; Loess, 1964) provides strong support for proactive interference as a major cause of forgetting. One'prior item has been shown to be sufficient to produce proactive interference and the effect increases with each successive item entering memory. These studies also demonstrate that build-up of interference is rapid (3 sec.) and quickly reaches a steady state (18 sec.). Although support for presence of interference has been found in motor short-term memory (Ascoli 8: Schmidt, 1969; Stelmach, 1969; Williams, 1970) proactive interference is not evident until at least four movements have been stored prior to the criterion movement. These studies of motor memory also demonstrate that interference does not occur before 10 sec. and is maximized by 15 sec. Differences in the two storage systems with respect to proactive interference are not limited to the number of prior items and retention interval for differences also exist with respect to the effects of the length of the intertrial-interval. In verbal memory, proactive interference is inversely related to the length of the incertrial-interval (Peterson & Gentile, 1965; Ellis & Anders, 1967) whereas it was found to have no effect in producing interference in motor short-term memory (Adams & Dykstra, 1966; Montegue & Hellix, 1968; Schmidt & Ascoli

Left- and right-handed male college students made verbal estimations of temporal durations during performance of recognition memory for words and faces, and with no concurrent task. Time judgments were shorter with both concurrent memory tasks than in the control condition, but did not differ between the two memory tasks. Also, these results were additive across groups. Considering the differential involvement of the two cerebral hemispheres in processing verbal and physiognomic stimuli, and the lack of an interaction between group (left- vs right- handers) and memory task, it was concluded that the results do not support a lateralization of function hypothesis with respect to judgments of temporal duration.

It has been demonstrated that anesthesia primarily affects the reticular activating system and psychological studies on patients undergoing anesthesia demonstrated a verbal memory defect. This study was performed in order to determine whether metabolic (uremic) encephalopathy follows the Jacksonian dissolution hypothesis and disrupts cortical function or whether it acts like an anesthetic, causes dysfunction in phylogenetically older systems and thereby produces a memory defect. Twenty-four uremic subjects were tested for memory function, language function, and intellectual function, and compared to 12 control subjects. The greatest difference between the groups was in immediate memory function suggesting that uremia probably acts in a manner similar to anesthesia (by causing dysfunction in the reticular activating system). It is postulated that poor arousal interferes with rehearsal and rehearsal is probably an important component of immediate memory.

Twelve developmental dysphasics and twelve control children were tested on De Renzi and Vignolo's Token Test. The performance of the dysphasics, though significantly poorer than that of the controls on Parts 2-5 of the test, seemed to follow a similar pattern. Both groups were errorless on the initial parts of the test. As the demand on auditory retention increased on subsequent parts of the test, the performance of both groups progressively deteriorated. However, the addition of grammatical complexity on Part 5, rather than causing even further deterioration in performance, actually served to improve the performance of both groups, though not significantly. Although the pattern of errors made by the two groups was similar, the quantity of errors made by the dysphasics, as compared to the normal control children, demonstrated the magnitude of the dysphasic children's receptive language impairment. Analysis of errors indicated that dysphasic children have greater difficulty with auditory retention and verbal memory than they do with the grammatical or structural complexity of language. It is suggested that the observed gross language impairment of developmentally dysphasic children does not result, at least primarily, from a specific inability to analyze the linguistic components of language. Rather, the language impairment of these children appears to reflect their primary inability to analyze the rapid stream of acoustic information which characterizes speech and is essential to normal speech perception and language development.

A number of experiments explored the hypothesis that immediate memory span is not constant, but varies with the length of the words to be recalled. Results showed: (1) Memory span is inversely related to word length across a wide range of materials; (2) When number of syllables and number of phonemes are held constant, words of short temporal duration are better recalled than words of long duration; (3) Span could be predicted on the basis of the number of words which the subject can read in approximately 2 sec; (4) When articulation is suppressed by requiring the subject to articulate an irrelevant sound, the word length effect disappears with visual presentation, but remains when presentation is auditory. The results are interpreted in terms of a phonemically-based store of limited temporal capacity, which may function as an output buffer for speech production, and as a supplement to a more central working memory system.

Two experiments were performed in an attempt to relate sleep stages with overnight memory of consonant trigrams and paired-associates. In Exp. 1, a 20-min. learning task before sleep did not alter sleep patterns of a group of high school and college students. Further, neither delta sleep nor REM sleep nor their interaction reliably correlated with recall in the morning. In Exp. 2, the effect of pharmacological alteration of the sleep pattern was assessed. Despite a large suppression of REM sleep and concomitant elevation of stage 2, recall and relearning in the morning were not different from non-drug values. These results indicate that no sleep stage is uniquely favorable or unfavorable to verbal memory.

Twenty-four subjects, 12 of whom were in the age range 18-30 years and 12 of whom were between 55-65 years, performed two semantic memory tasks. One task involved the recall of an instance from a designated category starting with a specified letter, and the second task required subjects to indicate whether a given work was or was not a member of a designated category (the recognition task). There was a differential effect of age on recall and recognition, the older subjects responding more slowly on the recognition task, but not on the recall task. The response times of the older subjects were less affected by the dominance of the to-be-retrieved information than were the younger subjects. These results suggested that subjects in the older age group may have retrieved information faster than the young subjects, but that they required longer to decide upon response.

The generality of the dissociative effects of a high dosage (1.40 g/kg) of rapidly ingested ethyl alcohol in non-alcoholic human subjects was examined. Verbal memory was found to be more susceptible to dissociation than either motor-skills learning or autonomic (heart-rate) control training. The dissociation of the verbal material appeared to be asymmetrical in that subjects who originally learned the material while intoxicated but were tested 48 hr later while sober showed a greater memory decrement than a group which learned the material originally while sober but was tested while intoxicated.

MF-$0.65 HC-$3.29 *Association (Psychological); Cognitive Processes; College Students; Criteria; Educational Research; *Memory; *Paired Associate Learning; Reading; *Recall (Psychological); *Word Recognition The purpose of the eight experiments was to assess the role which associations between two words played in recognition decisions. The evidence on weak associations established in the laboratory indicated that association was playing a small role, but that the recognition performance on pairs of words was highly predictable from frequency information. However, the use of strongly associated words indicated that the strength of the association per se was not a critical variable in recognition performance. A post hoc expansion of frequency theory was proposed. Some unexpected findings included criterion differences in making frequency judgments as compared with recognition decisions, and criterion differences in recognition tests on homonym pairs as compared with other classes of word pairs. (Author) U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH. EDUCATION & WELFARE NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF EDUCATION THIS DOCUMENT HAS BEEN REPRO DUCED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED FROM THE PERSON OR ORGANIZATION ORIGINATING IT POINTS OF VIEW OR OPINIONS STATED DO NOT NECESSARILY REPRESENT OFFICIAL NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF EDUCATION POSITION OR POLICY THE ROLE OF THE ASSOCIATION IN RECOGNITION MEMORY

Summary Short-term memory was investigated in 30 control and 125 unilaterally braindamaged patients with a series of tests requiring the immediate reproduction of strings of items of increasing length. In three tests the items were auditorially presented digits or words: one test asked for oral repetition of digits, while the other two required the patient to point to written digits or to pictures. The fourth test aimed at measuring spatial span. On both the Digits Forward test and the two other verbal tests not requiring the use of speech, left brain-damaged patients were impaired in comparison to normals, while the right brain-damaged patients were not. Aphasics had a significantly shorter verbal span than non-aphasic patients with left hemisphere damage. Spatial span, on the other hand, was significantly affected by a lesion posteriorly located in either hemisphere, but not by aphasia. Two patients with an exceedingly poor verbal memory span were observed one suffering from anomic aphasia and the other from conduction aphasia. There were also two right hemisphere damaged patients who showed an extreme reduction of spatial span, which could not be accounted for by space perceptual disorders and contrasted with a normal performance on a spatial long-term memory test.

The influence of different target stimuli on impression order effects was tested. Sixty Ss evaluated bivalent sets of personality trait adjectives which purportedly described a hypothetical stranger, the E, or the Ss themselves. Under unwarned recall conditions, variations in the object of description significantly influenced impression order effects (p < .01). It was suggested that this effect may have been a function of attention decrements and implicit evaluations associated with various levels of personal relevance of the impression formation task. Analyses of adjective recall supported the verbal memory hypothesis of impression formation for only the LH sets in the forewarned recall condition. Recall analyses, however, suggested the importance of recall measurement criteria used in tests of the verbal memory hypothesis.

The word verbal as it appears in the title of this essay looks in two directions or has two antitheses. In combination with the word style it designates a level of meaning distinct from the substantial, and especially from the stated part of substantial meaning. At the same time, verbal implies that the level of stylistic meaning is something different from what is expressed by the medium of any other art, and that the discussion will avoid such metaphors as “verbal painting” and “verbal music”—or if it employs them briefly, will do so in full overtness.

Pictorial and verbal encoding in short-term memory of geometric figures and their names was studied in preschool children, using reaction time to a same-different judgment task. Children, like adults, were able to encode either pictures or names in either a pictorial or verbal fashion, as appropriate and with equal facility, although responses to second pictures were faster than responses to second words. Children's latencies were far longer than adults in a comparable task, and children were relatively much slower in switching encoding modalities when so required.

This note reviews evidence inconsistent with current theories of STM. Original data are repotted on Hebb's “activity trace” and on the role of RI and PI in STM. The note ends with a discussion of the possible role of representational thought in STM.

Summary In two experiments, S s were read sets of 6 or 8 personality adjectives, and asked to rate their liking of the person so described. In some conditions, S was also requested to recall the adjectives just read. The personality impression data showed a primacy (first impression) effect when recall was not required. Introduction of recall reduced the primacy and, in one condition, caused a recency effect. These results were interpreted as indicating that the primacy was primarily caused by decreased attention to the later adjectives, and that the use of concomitant recall destroyed this primacy by causing S to attend to the later adjectives more completely. The serial recall curves showed a small to moderate primacy component, and a very strong recency component. Further detailed analyses of the recall data were also given. Two implications were drawn from the data. First, it was concluded that the impression memory is distinct from the verbal memory for the adjectives. This conclusion was based on contrasts between the observed impression effects and those that would be expected if the impression depended on the verbal memory. Three objections to this conclusion, based on the possibility that recall probability was an inappropriate index of verbal-memory strength, were also discussed. Second, it was tentatively suggested that a linear model, together with the attention decrement notion, gave the best account of the data. It was finally noted that the linear model also provides a representation of the impression memory that is in harmony with the first conclusion.

(1956). The Effects of a Dual-Level Stimulus-Word List on the Occurrence of Clustering in Recall. The Journal of General Psychology: Vol. 55, No. 1, pp. 51-58.

Some salient concepts derived from the information sciences and currently used in theories of human memory are critically reviewed. The application of automata theory is proposed as a new approach in this field. The approach is illustrated by applying it to verbal memory.

Four experiments are reported which examined memory capacity and retrieval speed for pictures and for words. Single-trial learning tasks were employed throughout, with memory performance assessed by forced-choice recognition, recall measures or choice reaction-time tasks. The main experimental findings were: (1) memory capacity, as a function of the amount of material presented, follows a general power law with a characteristic exponent for each task; (2) pictorial material obeys this power law and shows an overall superiority to verbal material. The capacity of recognition memory for pictures is almost limitless, when measured under appropriate conditions; (3) when the recognition task is made harder by using more alternatives, memory capacity stays constant and the superiority of pictures is maintained; (4) picture memory also exceeds verbal memory in terms of verbal recall; comparable recognition/recall ratios are obtained for pictures, words and nonsense syllables; (5) verbal memory shows a higher retrieval speed than picture memory, as inferred from reaction-time measures. Both types of material obey a power law, when reaction-time is measured for various sizes of learning set, and both show very rapid rates of memory search.From a consideration of the experimental results and other data it is concluded that the superiority of the pictorial mode in recognition and free recall learning tasks is well established and cannot be attributed to methodological artifact.