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We are able to retrieve information from our short-term memory quickly. Saul Sternberg (1966, 1969) conducted a series of experiments to determine whether people scan items in short-term memory one at a time (serial processing) or all at once (parallel processing).
In one study, he presented a display of from one to six different digits to a participant for 1.2 seconds. Then he presented a test digit and the participant had to decide whether the test digit had been included in the display just shown. If parallel processing occurred, the length of the display should not influence the reaction time, but if serial processing occurred, the reaction time should increase with an increase in the length of the display. Sternberg found that it took a minimum of 397.2 milliseconds, or msec (each second contains 1,000 msec), to respond when 1 item was in the display and increased by 37.9 msec with each additional item. This indicated an average scanning rate (without responding) of about 27 digits per second. An interesting finding was that the reaction time was about the same whether the response was a "yes" or a "no." In other words, participants did not stop responding when they found a match but continued searching the entire display in their memory. This process is called an exhaustive search. Thus, Sternberg concluded that people perform an exhaustive serial search when retrieving information from STM. |
To find out more about Retrieval in Short-Term Memory,
Connect to these sites:
Miller's Magic Number 7 original paper
List of references in working memory
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