We show that an extended system operating in the regime of stochastic reson
ance can act as a short-term memory device. The system under study is a rin
g of overdamped bistable oscillators coupled directionally, being each also
subject to an external source of Gaussian white noise (the noise sources a
re independent). A single oscillator is driven by an external periodic forc
e, assumed to act only over the time that the signal takes to traverse the
whole ring. A traveling wave is then found to be transmitted several times
along the ring with a small damping, provided that the driven oscillator op
erates in a regime close to stochastic resonance. If noise is suppressed fr
om any oscillator of the chain, the traveling wave is immediately damped. T
he ring is thus found to act as a short-term memory device in which the sto
red information (one bit, corresponding to the presence or absence of the e
xternal driving) is sustained by noise during a characteristic time T-mem.