The Item versus the Object in Memory: On the Implausibility of Overwriting As a Mechanism for Forgetting in Short-Term Memory.

C Philip Beaman,Dylan M Jones

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00341

C Philip Beaman, Dylan M Jones

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00341

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Abstract

The nature of forgetting in short-term memory remains a disputed topic, with much debate focussed upon whether decay plays a fundamental role (Berman et al., 2009; Altmann and Schunn, 2012; Barrouillet et al., 2012; Neath and Brown, 2012; Oberauer and Lewandowsky, 2013; Ricker et al., 2014) but much less focus on other plausible mechanisms. One such mechanism of long-standing in auditory memory is overwriting (e.g., Crowder and Morton, 1969) in which some aspects of a representation are “overwritten” and rendered inaccessible by the subsequent presentation of a further item. Here, we review the evidence for different forms of overwriting (at the feature and item levels) and examine the plausibility of this mechanism both as a form of auditory memory and when viewed in the context of a larger hearing, speech and language understanding system.

Highlights

Specialty section: This article was submitted to Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology
We review the evidence for different forms of overwriting and examine the plausibility of this mechanism both as a form of auditory memory and when viewed in the context of a larger hearing, speech and language understanding system
A key feature of the classical short-term memory (STM) research program is the importance of serial order (Lashley, 1951; Conrad, 1960; Murdock, 1968, 1983; Lewandowsky and Murdock, 1989; Henson, 1998; Brown et al, 2000; Botvinick and Plaut, 2006; Burgess and Hitch, 2006)

Summary

Introduction

Specialty section: This article was submitted to Auditory Cognitive Neuroscience, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology. The principal difficulty with overwriting as the sole, or key, determinant of failure to recall in these or any other accounts is that while many studies have reported greater interference when irrelevant information (e.g., from a secondary task; Lange and Oberauer, 2005) is related to the memoranda, or when the list items are themselves similar along a specific dimension (e.g., the phonological similarity effect; Conrad, 1964; Conrad and Hull, 1964; Baddeley, 1966) other studies have shown the opposite.

Results

Conclusion