Short-term memory

Short -term memory is a term in psychology for the classification of certain memory phenomena and serves in particular the determination of long-term memory.

A short visual image can be analyzed, although it is no longer visible; a melody is for us not to individual tones, but appears as a whole. We can head count and read a text and understand, without being able to memorize it. We propose a phone number after and have already forgotten again before we reach the phone, unless they tell us we go again and again before. Such known from the introspection phenomena occupy the thinkers since ancient times. Aristotle distinguished by the title of his treatise De memoria et reminiscentia between memoria (today we would say: retrieval from long-term memory ) and reminiscentia ( recognition ). William James called the maintenance of mental content in the consciousness of the primary memory and secondary memory differed from it, the contents of which must be for a time from the consciousness and reactivated.

In the modern experimental psychology several exist, sometimes contradictory models to explain the research data; the existence of a separate short-term memory is controversial. Well studied and stable replicable are, inter alia, the Primacy - recency effect, Dichotisches hearing, Ulrich Neisser's Iconic memory and other sensory registers and much more. A comprehensive model of short term memory, which has gained great notoriety, Baddeley working memory model.