Acoustic and Associative Coding in Short-Term Memory

Abstract

Short lists of word-digit pairs were presented to 456 college student subjects. One of the words was repeated as a memory probe either immediately after list presentation or after a short rehearsal interval. The stimulus words were either acoustically identical or associatively related (UP, DOWN). Both acoustic identity and associative relatedness produced a memory decrement which decreased with rehearsal. One interpretation of these results is that the primary memory trace is a multiple-dimension one and that, given time, subjects can recover non-acoustic information from it. The data also indicate that the “fate” over time is different for acoustically similar and associatively related items.