PROCESSING STRATEGIES AND SECONDARY MEMORY IN VERY RAPID FORGETTING

When a memory test is unexpected, recall performance is quite poor at retention intervals as short as 2-4 seconds. Orienting tasks that chan ge encoding conditions are known to affect forgetting in such ''very r apid forgetting'' paradigms where people are misled to believe that re call will not be required. We evaluated the hypothesis that difference s in forgetting among orienting tasks are attributable to contribution s of secondary memory during encoding in two experiments. In Experimen t 1, short-term recall performance was inversely related to task deman ds during encoding, although long-term memory performance was not. Tas k demands were assessed by making the duration of stimulus presentatio n dependent on the time required to perform three different orienting tasks. In Experiment 2, we compared performance of that variable-lengt h stimulus presentation to the fixed-length presentation used in most prior research. The results suggested that additional encoding or rehe arsal time does not have an appreciable impact on short-term performan ce. Thus, differences in forgetting appeared to be a function of the c ontribution of secondary memory rather than a function of the time ava ilable to engage in primary memory rehearsal strategies.