SEQUENTIAL SHORT-TERM MEMORY : SOME TRACKING EXPERIMENTS

Abstract

Twelve naval ratings had to reproduce an irregular wavy track after a time lag. Rate of input and duration of delay were varied systematically in different trials, both with and without preview, Accuracy in reproducing the positions of the reversals in direction of the track was found to depend only upon the time lag: the longer the delay the worse the reproduction. Amount of input held in memory did not have a significant effect. These quite different findings from previous experiments were attributed to the reduced chances for rehearsal and to the reduced importance of order-information. A theoretical analysis is included of the independent variables affecting sequential short-term memory,