Yet, the subjective experience of a difference between primary and secondary memory does not automatically guarantee that these types of memory separately contribute to the science of remembering. Primary memory seems taxed as one is asked to keep in mind aspects of an unfamiliar situation, such as names, places, things, and ideas that one has not encountered before. The nonsense syllables that Ebbinghaus had invented as a tool can be seen to have acquired more ecological validity in an industrial age with expanding information demands, perhaps highlighting the practical importance of primary memory in daily life. (The author’s telephone number in 1957 was Whitehall 2–6742 the number is still assigned, albeit as a seven-digit number.) Even before the book by Ebbinghaus, Nipher (1878) reported on the serial position curve obtained among the digits in logarithms that he tried to recall. This use of telephone numbers, complemented by a word prefix, of course spread. Three years later, operators in Lowell, Massachusetts started using telephone numbers for more than 200 subscribers so that substitute operators could be more easily trained if the town’s four regular operators succumbed to a raging measles epidemic. In the 1850s, telegraph operators had to remember and interpret rapid series of dots and dashes conveyed acoustically. The Industrial Revolution made some new demands on what James (1890) called primary memory. The primary memory of James is like the first fleeting grasp of Ebbinghaus. Soon afterward, James (1890) proposed a distinction between primary memory, the small amount of information held as the trailing edge of the conscious present, and secondary memory, the vast body of knowledge stored over a lifetime. Stable memorization sometimes required further repetitions of the series. 33) but that this immediate memory did not ensure that the series had been memorized in a way that would allow its recall later on. Among many important observations, Ebbinghaus noticed that he often had a “first fleeting grasp … of the series in moments of special concentration” (p. The scientific study of memory is usually traced back to Hermann Ebbinghaus (1885/1913 translation), who examined his own acquisition and forgetting of new information in the form of series of nonsense syllables tested at various periods upto 31 days. 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 names of new students, or to recall which student made what comment in an ongoing conversation, has diminished over the years. Yet, long before there were true psychological laboratories, a more careful observation must have shown that there are separable aspects of memory. Some people have a good ability to capture facts and events in memory, whereas others have less such ability. How many phases of a memory are there? In a naïve view of memory, it could be made all of one cloth. Historical roots of a basic scientific question The evidence is evaluated and placed within a theoretical framework depicted in Fig. Regardless of the definition, there are some measures of memory in the short term that seem routine and do not correlate well with cognitive aptitudes and other measures (those usually identified with the term “working memory”) that seem more attention demanding and do correlate well with these aptitudes. Working memory has been conceived and defined in three different, slightly discrepant ways: as short-term memory applied to cognitive tasks, as a multi-component system that holds and manipulates information in short-term memory, and as the use of attention to manage short-term memory. Both properties of short-term memory are still controversial but the current literature is rather encouraging regarding the existence of both decay and capacity limits. Long- and short-term memory could differ in two fundamental ways, with only short-term memory demonstrating (1) temporal decay and (2) chunk capacity limits. This chapter strives to reduce that confusion and makes up-to-date assessments of these types of memory. In the recent literature there has been considerable confusion about the three types of memory: long-term, short-term, and working memory.
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