Development of recall from short-term and long-term memory: Effects of list length, word length, taxonomic relatedness, acoustic similarity, and modality.

Abstract

An emerging theory of short-term memory, called fuzzy trace theory (FTT), postulates a link between memory and reasoning ability that might explain the relationship of performances on memory span tasks to other measures of intelligence. Two key assumptions regarding the encoding and retrieval of information in short-term memory (STM) are central to FTT. First, stored memory traces are assumed to vary along a continuum of verbatim detail to gist. Second, retrieval from STM is assumed to vary along a continuum of simple to reconstructive readout. The three experiments reported in this dissertation were designed to examine these two assumptions regarding encoding and retrieval by examining subjects' performances on memory span tasks. Memory span was the measure of choice for this series of experiments because span tasks have long been considered a pure measures of memory. Recall of items (item memory) and ordering of items for serial recall (order memory) were factored and treated as independent memory processes. The findings in the three experiments indicated that item memory relied more on simple readout of verbatim detail, while order memory relied on reconstruction from gist. More development was observed for order memory, indicating that age changes in memory span performance may be caused by development of gist extraction and reconstructive processes. It was suggested that children's ability to order items is the component of serial recall that explains the link between memory span performance and other measures of intelligence.