Psychology Commons^™

The Effects Upon Short-Term Memory Of Acoustic Interference And The Cognitive Separation Of A Reduntant Element, Robert A. Smallwood

Master's Theses

Sperling (1963) noted that some subjects (Ss) stated they could "hear" material being held in short-term storage, and he suggested that short_term memory (STM) for verbal materials may be in the form of an auditory loop. The first major laboratory investigations of this topic were made by Conrad (1962;1964) who examined the errors made in immediate recall, and found that substitution errors tend to involve units that sound alike (acoustically-similar), even when the original stimuli were visual. He concluded that visual letters are recorded into auditory representations, which may subsequently be confused with one author. The auditory, or at least …