RECONFIRMATION OF THE SHORT-TERM STORAGE CONCEPT

Recent research questions the existence of a short-term storage mechan ism capable of holding limited information temporarily. Specifically, serial-recall results with a through-list distractor (TLD) procedure, in which a distracting task is interposed between list items as well a s between the list and recall period, generally resemble the results o f immediate-recall procedures. The present study, however, reconfirms the utility of short-term storage by demonstrating an important differ ence between immediate and TLD recall. A word-length effect, or advant age for lists of shorter words (which minimize short-term forgetting d uring spoken recall), did not occur with a TLD procedure.