Recent Developments in Short‐term Memory

This paper reviews some recent developments in the area of short‐term memory. The methodological innovations include the distractor technique and the probe technique. The main empirical phenomena discussed are recency effects, input and output interference, the length—difficulty relationship, inter‐item interference, proactive interference effects, the distribution of practice interaction, associative symmetry, modality effect, acoustic confusions, and transpositions. A ‘modal model’ is presented which attempts to synthesize some recent theoretical conceptions; the components include sensory, short‐term and long‐term stores with three different forgetting mechanisms (decay, displacement and interference, respectively).