Wisen's notes

# How long would information stays in short-term memory?

The name Short-term memory implies that information won't live long there. But long will would information stays there?

I don't really understand the result of the studies. What seems to be implied based on what I've read so far:

  1. It's hard to measure how long the information would live because a person may rehearse the information over and over again until it goes to Long-term memory
  2. Interference, a process of which new or old information is interfering with what's being stored in the short-term memory may disrupt how long it lives.
  3. Despite the interference that happened, the conclusion seems to lead to about 15 to 20 seconds.

# References

Goldstein, Cognitive Psychology (p. 133).

Why would memory become worse after a few trials? Keppel and Underwood (1962) suggested that the drop-off in memory was due not to passive decay of the memory trace over time, but to proactive interference - interference that occurs when information that was learned previously interferes with learning new information.

Goldstein, Cognitive Psychology (p. 134).

From the point of view of our everyday life experience, it is easy to see that interference is happening constantly as one event follows the next and we pay attention to one thing after another. The outcome of this constant interference is that the effective duration of STM, when rehearsal is prevented, is about 15 to 20 seconds or less (Zhang & Luck, 2009).