Articulation and acoustic confusability in short-term memory.

Immediate recall may be based on information stored as speech, or on a short-lived and more purely sensory kind of storage. The latter has often been called the image: the visual image probably disappears within a second or so (Sperling, 1960), while the auditory image may last for as long as 3 or 4 sec. (Mackworth, 1964). The latter phenomenon is very close to the notion of memory (Waugh & Norman, 1965), although for Waugh and Norman, primary also is considered to include very recent items which may have been articulated at presentation. The purpose of the present work was to discover whether items ostensibly retrieved from sensory storage were as susceptible to the effects of acoustic confusability (AC) as were items ostensibly retrieved from speech