Chapter 20 What are the differences between long-term, short-term, and working memory?
Section snippets
Historical roots of a basic scientific question
How many phases of a memory are there? In a naïve view of memory, it could be made all of one cloth. Some people have a good ability to capture facts and events in memory, whereas others have less such ability. Yet, long before there were true psychological laboratories, a more careful observation must have shown that there are separable aspects of memory. An elderly teacher might be seen relating old lessons as vividly as he ever did, and yet it might be evident that his ability to capture the
Description of three kinds of memory
In this chapter I will assess the strength of evidence for three types of memory: long-term memory, short-term memory, and working memory. Long-term memory is a vast store of knowledge and a record of prior events, and it exists according to all theoretical views; it would be difficult to deny that each normal person has at his or her command a rich, although not flawless or complete, set of long-term memories.
Short-term memory is related to the primary memory of James (1890) and is a term that
The short-term memory/long-term memory distinction
If there is a difference between short- and long-term memory stores, there are two possible ways in which these stores may differ: in duration, and in capacity. A duration difference means that items in short-term storage decay from this sort of storage as a function of time. A capacity difference means that there is a limit in how many items short-term storage can hold. If there is only a limit in capacity, a number of items smaller than the capacity limit could remain in short-term storage
The short-term memory/working memory distinction
The distinction between short-term memory and working memory is clouded in a bit of confusion but that is largely the result of different investigators using different definitions. Miller et al. (1960) used the term “working memory” to refer to temporary memory from a functional standpoint, so from their point of view there is no clear distinction between short-term and working memory. Baddeley and Hitch (1974) were fairly consistent with this definition but overlaid some descriptions on the
Conclusion
The distinction between long-term and short-term memory depends on whether it can be demonstrated that there are properties specific to short-term memory; the main candidates include temporal decay and a chunk capacity limit. The question of decay is still pretty much open to debate, whereas there is growing support for a chunk capacity limit. These limits were discussed in a framework shown in Fig. 1.
The distinction between short-term memory and working memory is one that depends on the
Acknowledgment
This work was completed with the assistance of NIH Grant R01 HD-21338.
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