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Short-Term Memory

The capacity of verbal short-term memory, as indexed by the ability to recall a series

of items in correct order of presentation, is well-known to be limited and there has been an

ongoing debate about how this limitation is best explained for several decades. This debate

has often been expressed in terms of the cause, or causes, of forgetting from short-term

memory (STM), and cast as a contest between explanations based on the passive decay of

information in STM and explanations that appeal to interference (Nairne, 2002). Decay, as

the loss of information purely as a function of time, is a concept which is readily captured in

conceptual or computational models as a decline in the activation level of representations

(Mora & Camos, 2013; Page & Norris, 1998). Interference, on the other hand, is more

heterogeneous, as there have been a number of types of interference identified and several

mechanisms proposed (see Neath & Surprenant, 2003, for more).

Brown-Peterson Paradigm

Although the Brown-Peterson paradigm (Brown, 1958; Peterson & Peterson, 1959)

was originally taken as providing evidence for decay as the cause of forgetting, explanations

in terms of interference soon emerged. In this paradigm participants are presented with three-

items to remember, and then engage in a distractor activity before recall, and recall

performance drops rapidly over the distractor period. Keppel and Underwood (1962)

demonstrated that this pattern only emerged over the first few trials and that performance on

the first trial was unaffected by the length of the distractor period, suggesting that forgetting

appears to reflect proactive interference from the previous trials. The more accepted

interpretation for this type of proactive interference (Unsworth et al., 2008), is that it reflects

a decline in the ability to discriminate between items in different lists. This notion is

particularly well captured in the SIMPLE model of memory (Brown et al., 2007) which

attributes the cause of forgetting to difficulty in distinguishing between items in memory.

Other Models

Alternate conceptualisations of interference as a more active process can be found in

other models of short-term memory.

Multiple-store View

In the multiple-store view of memory that developed with the information processing

approach, short-term memory was assumed to have a limited capacity, and once capacity was

reached each newly presented item displaced an item already in the store (Waugh & Norman,

1965). This approach implied a fixed capacity regardless of the type of stimulus (e.g., words,

digits, letters) so demonstrations of variation in memory span, the maximum length of list

that can be recalled correctly, challenged this view. One notable example is the difference in

digit span across languages in bilinguals (Ellis, 1992).

Recent Models

More recent accounts of interference described the overwriting of information in short-

term memory by subsequently presented information (Neath, 2000; Oberauer & Kliegl,

2006).

Feature Model

In the Feature model (Nairne, 1990; Neath, 2000), items are represented as a vector of

features and loss of information from the short-term memory trace occurs when newly

presented items overwrite features of the items already encoded into memory. Thus, an

explicit role for retroactive interference is articulated in these views.

Despite the theoretical importance of interference as an explanation of forgetting from

STM there is surprisingly little direct evidence that interference between the to-be-

remembered items in memory is responsible for the limited capacity seen in performance.

That is, the research literature has not considered whether interference between presented

items contributes to the breakdown in ordered recall performance as list length moves beyond
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the typical number of items that adults can recall without error. Importantly, most evidence

for interference as a cause of forgetting, or the limited capacity of STM, comes from studies

in which material is presented to the participants separately from the to-be-remembered list.

Interference amongst items that are actively being attended to and remembered is

conceptually distinct from interference with the items in memory from stimuli that are not

deliberately being encoded and retained. Little work has focused on the former problem,

despite its more direct relationship to the claim that memory performance, and specifically

forgetting, is a function of interference between target items.

Much of the research designed to look at the nature of interference has used a

retroactive interference paradigm, like the Brown-Peterson paradigm, in which some material

or activity intervenes between list presentation and recall. Whilst these studies demonstrate

that this extra-list material can disrupt memory, arguably by interference, they do not offer

direct support for the notion that the memory items interfere with each other and thereby limit

the number of items that can be recalled in order. They also fail to speak to the nature of that

interference. Although some studies have interleaved interfering material between the items

of the memory list and researchers have argued that these items are encoded into memory

(Oberauer & Lange, 2008) even these studies do not provide direct evidence that memory list

items interfere with each other.

The phonological similarity effect, namely poorer recall of lists of similar sounding

words compared to dissimilar sounding words (Wickelgren, 1965; Baddeley, 1966), might be

argued to provide evidence of interference within a list. However, this is debatable. The

effect of this manipulation is often claimed to only affect the order of recall of the items and

not the identity of the items (Baddeley et al., 2018) although some studies have reported

better item recall for lists of rhyming words than dissimilar words, questioning the

completeness of this explanation (Gupta et al., 2005). The Feature model (Nairne, 1990;
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Neath, 2000) incorporates an overwriting process and can model the similarity effect because

a second process operates on the overwritten traces to match them to a member of a set of

intact representations of the list items for selection at output. In the absence of a deleterious

effect of similarity on item memory the most that can be said is that overwriting, with an

additional process, could produce the pattern of results, but it is not compelling evidence for

the existence of overwriting.

Another source of evidence for interference in short-term memory comes from the

unattended speech effect, the finding that short-term memory performance is impaired by the

presence of speech that is irrelevant to the memory task (Salamé & Baddeley, 1982).

Although Salamé and Baddeley (1982) reported that interference was greater when the

unattended speech shared phonemes with the memory items, later research has challenged

this conclusion and a number of studies show no such effect (LeCompte & Shaibe, 1997).

This suggests that the interference is not due to the overwriting of features of the memory

items by the irrelevant items and so provides no evidence that this mechanism is a cause of

forgetting of lists in quiet conditions.

In their investigation into the nature of interference in short-term memory, Oberauer

and Lange (2008) distinguished between feature overwriting, feature migration across items

and similarity-based confusions as potential types of interference. They asked participants to

read aloud a list of words followed by a set of distractor letters, also to be read aloud, and

then recall the words – a standard retroactive interference paradigm. Three of the phonemes

of a target word in the list also occurred in three different letters. The results were argued to

produce specific interference through feature overwriting – performance on a control target

word that shared no phonemes with the letters was 69% while on the overlapped target word

it was 66%. Like other studies, this experiment demonstrated that items that did not have to

be remembered could interfere with recall of the list words. However, Oberauer and Lange
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(2008) reported a second experiment with an identical procedure, except that participants

were asked to recall both the words and letters in serial order, and obtained identical results.

This is the only study we have been able to find that has directly demonstrated interference

between items in the memory list. Although this study unambiguously shows an effect of

interference, such a small effect also clearly indicates that overwriting of features by the same

feature occurring in a later item is insufficient to explain the limited capacity of STM.

The aim of the experiments reported here was to further the investigation of the

processes of interference as a potential cause of the limited capacity of STM. Oberauer and

Lange (2008) acknowledged that the effect they reported was surprisingly small if

overwriting is a major determinant of memory capacity and suggested that they used a “crude

manipulation of feature overlap” (p. 742) and there is clearly much that could be explored.

One factor that may also have contributed to the small effect was the random manner in

which the interfering phonemes were arranged in their lists. In the experiments that follow a

different approach to creating interference is taken, by constructing lists that align the

positional relationship between the phonemes of the target word and the list words that share

a phoneme with the target, hereafter referred to as the overlapping list items.
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Nur Elfa Shahanis Bte Padzlun

Student ID: 10248218

UOW ID: 8033523