Aben et al. (2012) take issue with the unthoughtful use of the terms “working memory” (WM) and “short-term memory” (STM) in the cognitive and neuroscientific literature. Whereas I agree that neuroscientists using the term WM to refer to sustained neural activation and cognitive psychologists using the terms interchangeably reflects that the field has lost control over its own dictionary, the recommendations to develop more tasks does not seem to get to the heart of the matter. Here, I argue in favor of a theoretical approach to the constructs of WM and STM, as the terms have become as impure as the tasks that purport to measure the constructs

Davelaar, Eddy J.

English

PubMed

Birkbeck Institutional Research Online

GENERAL COMMENTARYpublished: 31 January 2013doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00013Short-term memory as a working memory control processEddy J. Davelaar*Department of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck College, University of London, London, UK*Correspondence: e.davelaar@bbk.ac.ukEdited by:Kimron Shapiro, University of Birmingham, UKReviewed by:Kimron Shapiro, University of Birmingham, UKIlja G. Sligte, University of Amsterdam, NetherlandsA commentary onAbout the distinction between workingmemory and short-term memoryby Aben, B., Stapert, S., and Blokland, A.(2012). Front. Psychology 3:301. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00301Aben et al. (2012) take issue with theunthoughtful use of the terms “work-ing memory” (WM) and “short-termmemory” (STM) in the cognitive andneuroscientific literature. Whereas I agreethat neuroscientists using the term WMto refer to sustained neural activation andcognitive psychologists using the termsinterchangeably reflects that the field haslost control over its own dictionary, therecommendations to develop more tasksdoes not seem to get to the heart of thematter. Here, I argue in favor of a theoreti-cal approach to the constructs of WM andSTM, as the terms have become as impureas the tasks that purport to measure theconstructs.STM vs. WMThe concepts of STM andWMare theoret-ical and should be treated like that. In the1960s, STM was equated to primary mem-ory. Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968) theo-rized that the cognitive system sets upa buffer to maintain information tem-porally. This has been interpreted as astructural buffer that maintains tempo-rary information, but could also mean atemporary buffer that maintains durableinformation. The theory states that “infor-mation entering STS comes directly fromLTS and only indirectly from the sensoryregister” (Atkinson and Shiffrin, 1968,p. 115). In other words, “the activation ofa feature in LTS is equivalent to the placingof this item in STS” (Shiffrin, 1976, p. 194).Furthermore, the “initial activation ofthe storage causes temporary traces toappear which dissipate unless some actionis taken to maintain them. This activ-ity is primary memory” (Norman, 1968,p. 525). Thus, STM is a process, not astructure.Baddeley (1966) observed that imme-diate recall was particularly sensitive tointerference when maintaining acousticcompared to semantic information,which eventually led to the assump-tion that verbal STM as a structuralcomponent operates on phonologicalinformation (Baddeley and Hitch, 1974).The WM model initially separated theexecutive control processes from the short-term storage component. Thus, WM= STM + executive control processes.However, in later work, the process ofactive maintenance of information wasconsidered one of the executive pro-cesses performed by the central executive(Baddeley, 1996) and that the active partof phonological LTM is the content ofthe phonological loop (Baddeley et al.,1998). This implies that WM = execu-tive control processes or STM = processwithin WM.SIMPLE SPAN vs. COMPLEX SPANAben et al. suggest that in order to under-stand the STM/WM distinction morework is needed in which tasks vary inthe duration that information is keptand the cognitive load. This is a theory-laden suggestion, as it assumes thatforgetting in STM is due to time-baseddecay and that WM is best assessed byvarying cognitive load. This is a hotlydebated position (see e.g., Barrouilletet al., 2007; Lewandowsky et al., 2009)and it will be a theoretical nightmareto construct a set of tasks on which allresearchers could agree. This is even moreaggravated by the fact that short-termforgetting is at the heart of another debateon whether there is a need to postu-late a limited-capacity short-term buffer(Crowder, 1982; Greene, 1986; Howardand Kahana, 2002; Davelaar et al., 2005;Brown et al., 2007). Provocatively put,a simple span task may never measureSTM storage capacity, as STM does notexist!Nevertheless, those who take the viewthat there is no such thing as STM stilltalk about WM (e.g., Brown et al., 2007),suggesting that a general consensus is thatWM includes processes that are not relatedto short-term storage.Another problem with suggestingdeveloping more tasks is that such a focusmay fall prey to the criticism of circularity.That is, one creates a “simple” task thatonly requires storage, a “complex” taskthat requires additional processes, andthen uses these tasks to show differentialcorrelation patterns between the tasks andsome cognitive ability. By design, the taskswill follow a WM = STM + X format.Showing that the STM component or theX component correlates with fluid intelli-gence, reasoning, or language ability, doesnot say anything about the natures of anddistinction between STM of WM. The dis-tinction is already built in by the choice oftasks.Aben et al. acknowledge that the sim-plicity of tacking on a secondary task toa simple span task has led to a prolif-eration of WM tasks. Yet, different WMtasks do not load on a single WM con-struct (Miyake et al., 2000). The explana-tion is that WM is composed of distinctprocesses (Baddeley, 1996; Miyake et al.,2000). However, this defeats the purposeof creating a complex span task to mea-sure WM capacity, as it would requirethe development of several complex spantasks measuring capacities of “shifting,”www.frontiersin.org January 2013 | Volume 4 | Article 13 | 1Davelaar STM as a WM process“inhibition,” “updating,” “dual tasking,”and so on.A more severe problem with followinglabeled statistical latent variables is the dis-regard of procedural similarity. For exam-ple, Engle et al.’s (1999) WM and STMlatent constructs are perfectly confoundedwith the dual-task and single-task require-ment of the component tasks, respectively.This is also the case when the modal-ity of presentation is taken into account(Kane et al., 2004). In fact Oberauer et al.(2012), presented a computational modelthat captures the Kane et al. (2004) datawithout recourse to different processingcapacities. In their model, the statisticallatent constructs truly represent differentbehavioral patterns due to task-proceduraldifferences and not due to different latentcognitive constructs. Hence, developingnew complex span tasks would not pro-vide evidence for separate WM and STMconstructs.CONCLUSIONThe review by Aben et al. highlights arough edge in the STM/WM literature,but focuses too much on the most impurepart of the STM/WM distinction, the spantasks. The distinction between STM andWM and, more importantly, their interre-lationship becomes clear at the theoreticallevel, but task impurity will plague anycorrelational study. Addressing the distinc-tion at the theoretical level allows honingin on the questions that speak directly tothe nature and mechanism of STM/WMand provide directions toward more suit-able approaches.REFERENCESAben, B., Stapert, S., and Blokland, A. (2012). Aboutthe distinction between working memory andshort-term memory. Front. Psychology 3:301. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00301Atkinson, R. C., and Shiffrin, R. M. (1968). “Humanmemory: a proposed system and its controlprocesses,” in The Psychology of Learning andMotivation, Vol. 2, eds K. W. Spence and J. T.Spence (New York, NY: Academic Press), 89–195.Baddeley, A. D. (1966). The influence of acousticand semantic similarity on long-term memory forword sequences. Q. J. Exp. Psychol. 18, 302–309.Baddeley, A. D. (1996). Exploring the cen-tral executive. Q. J. Exp. Psychol. 49,5–28.Baddeley, A. D., Gathercole, S., and Papagno,C. (1998). The phonological loop as a lan-guage learning device. Psychol. Rev. 105,158–173.Baddeley, A. D., and Hitch, G. (1974). “Workingmemory,” in The Psychology of Learning andMotivation: Advances in Research and Theory,Vol. 6, ed G. H. Bower (New York, NY: AcademicPress), 47–90.Barrouillet, P., Bernardin, S., Portrat, S., Vergauwe, E.,and Camos, V. (2007). Time and cognitive loadin working memory. J. Exp. Psychol. Learn. Mem.Cogn. 33, 570–585.Brown, G. D. A., Neath, I., and Chater, N. (2007).A temporal ratio model of memory. Psychol. Rev.114, 539–576.Crowder, R. G. (1982). Short-term memory: where dowe stand? Mem. Cognit. 21, 142–145.Davelaar, E. J., Goshen-Gottstein, Y., Askenazi,A., Haarmann, H. J., and Usher, M. (2005).The demise of short-term memory revisited:empirical and computational investiga-tions of recency effects. Psychol. Rev. 112,3–42.Engle, R. W., Tuholski, S. W., Laughlin, J. E., andConway, A. R. A. (1999). Working memory, short-term memory, and general fluid intelligence: alatent-variable approach. J. Exp. Psychol. Gen. 128,309–331.Greene, R. L. (1986). Sources of recency effects in freerecall. Psychol. Bull. 99, 221–228.Howard, M. W., and Kahana, M. J. (2002). Adistributed representation of temporal context.J. Math. Psychol. 46, 269–299.Kane, M. J., Hambrick, D. Z., Tuholski, S. W.,Wilhelm, O., Payne, T.W., and Engle, R.W. (2004).The generality of working memory capacity: alatent-variable approach to verbal and visuospatialmemory span and reasoning. J. Exp. Psychol. Gen.133, 189–217.Lewandowsky, S., Oberauer, K., and Brown, G.D. A. (2009). No temporal decay in verbalshort-term memory. Trends Cogn. Sci. 13,120–126.Miyake, A., Friedman, N. P., Emerson, M. J., Witzki,A. H., Howerter, A., and Wager, T. D. (2000).The unity and diversity of executive functionsand their contributions to complex “frontal lobe”tasks: a latent variable analysis. Cogn. Psychol. 41,49–100.Norman, D. A. (1968). Toward a theory ofmemory and attention. Psychol. Rev. 75,522–536.Oberauer, K., Lewandowsky, S., Farrell, S., Jarrold,C., and Greaves, M. (2012). Modeling workingmemory: an interference model of complex span.Psychon. Bull. Rev. 19, 779–819.Shiffrin, R. M. (1976). “Capacity limitations ininformation in information processing, atten-tion and memory,” in Handbook of Learningand Cognitive Processes. Vol. 4, Attention andMemory, ed W. K. Estes (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum),177–236.Received: 10 October 2012; accepted: 07 January 2013;published online: 31 January 2013.Citation: Davelaar EJ (2013) Short-term memory as aworkingmemory control process. Front. Psychology 4:13.doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00013This article was submitted to Frontiers in Cognition, aspecialty of Frontiers in Psychology.Copyright © 2013 Davelaar. This is an open-accessarticle distributed under the terms of the CreativeCommons Attribution License, which permits use, dis-tribution and reproduction in other forums, providedthe original authors and source are credited and sub-ject to any copyright notices concerning any third-partygraphics etc.Frontiers in Psychology | Cognition January 2013 | Volume 4 | Article 13 | 2

A distributed representation of temporal context.

A temporal ratio model of memory.

About the distinction between working memory and short-term memory.

accepted: 07

Capacity limitations in information in information processing, attention and memory,”

Exploring the central executive.

K a n e ,M .J . ,H a m b r i c k ,D .Z . ,T u h o l s k i

Modeling working memory: an interference model of complex span.

No temporal decay in verbal short-term memory.

Short-term memory as a workingmemorycontrolprocess.Front.Psychology4:13. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00013 This article was submitted to Frontiers in Cognition, a specialty of Frontiers

Short-term memory: where do we stand?

Sources of recency effects in free recall.

The demise of short-term memory revisited: empirical and computational investigations of recency effects.

The inﬂuence of acoustic and semantic similarity on long-term memory for word sequences.

The phonological loop as a language learning device.

The unity and diversity of executive functions and their contributions to complex “frontal lobe” tasks: a latent variable analysis.

Time and cognitive load in working memory.

Toward a theory of memory and attention.

Working memory, shortterm memory, and general ﬂuid intelligence: a latent-variable approach.

Working memory,”

Short-term memory as a working memory control process

Eddy J Davelaar

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Eddy J. Davelaar

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GENERAL COMMENTARY
published: 31 January 2013
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00013
Short-term memory as a working memory control process
Eddy J. Davelaar*
Department of Psychological Sciences, Birkbeck College, University of London, London, UK
*Correspondence: e.davelaar@bbk.ac.uk
Edited by:
Kimron Shapiro, University of Birmingham, UK
Reviewed by:
Kimron Shapiro, University of Birmingham, UK
Ilja G. Sligte, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
A commentary on
About the distinction between working
memory and short-term memory
by Aben, B., Stapert, S., and Blokland, A.
(2012). Front. Psychology 3:301. doi:
10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00301
Aben et al. (2012) take issue with the
unthoughtful use of the terms “work-
ing memory” (WM) and “short-term
memory” (STM) in the cognitive and
neuroscientific literature. Whereas I agree
that neuroscientists using the term WM
to refer to sustained neural activation and
cognitive psychologists using the terms
interchangeably reflects that the field has
lost control over its own dictionary, the
recommendations to develop more tasks
does not seem to get to the heart of the
matter. Here, I argue in favor of a theoreti-
cal approach to the constructs of WM and
STM, as the terms have become as impure
as the tasks that purport to measure the
constructs.
STM vs. WM
The concepts of STM andWMare theoret-
ical and should be treated like that. In the
1960s, STM was equated to primary mem-
ory. Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968) theo-
rized that the cognitive system sets up
a buffer to maintain information tem-
porally. This has been interpreted as a
structural buffer that maintains tempo-
rary information, but could also mean a
temporary buffer that maintains durable
information. The theory states that “infor-
mation entering STS comes directly from
LTS and only indirectly from the sensory
register” (Atkinson and Shiffrin, 1968,
p. 115). In other words, “the activation of
a feature in LTS is equivalent to the placing
of this item in STS” (Shiffrin, 1976, p. 194).
Furthermore, the “initial activation of
the storage causes temporary traces to
appear which dissipate unless some action
is taken to maintain them. This activ-
ity is primary memory” (Norman, 1968,
p. 525). Thus, STM is a process, not a
structure.
Baddeley (1966) observed that imme-
diate recall was particularly sensitive to
interference when maintaining acoustic
compared to semantic information,
which eventually led to the assump-
tion that verbal STM as a structural
component operates on phonological
information (Baddeley and Hitch, 1974).
The WM model initially separated the
executive control processes from the short-
term storage component. Thus, WM
= STM + executive control processes.
However, in later work, the process of
active maintenance of information was
considered one of the executive pro-
cesses performed by the central executive
(Baddeley, 1996) and that the active part
of phonological LTM is the content of
the phonological loop (Baddeley et al.,
1998). This implies that WM = execu-
tive control processes or STM = process
within WM.
SIMPLE SPAN vs. COMPLEX SPAN
Aben et al. suggest that in order to under-
stand the STM/WM distinction more
work is needed in which tasks vary in
the duration that information is kept
and the cognitive load. This is a theory-
laden suggestion, as it assumes that
forgetting in STM is due to time-based
decay and that WM is best assessed by
varying cognitive load. This is a hotly
debated position (see e.g., Barrouillet
et al., 2007; Lewandowsky et al., 2009)
and it will be a theoretical nightmare
to construct a set of tasks on which all
researchers could agree. This is even more
aggravated by the fact that short-term
forgetting is at the heart of another debate
on whether there is a need to postu-
late a limited-capacity short-term buffer
(Crowder, 1982; Greene, 1986; Howard
and Kahana, 2002; Davelaar et al., 2005;
Brown et al., 2007). Provocatively put,
a simple span task may never measure
STM storage capacity, as STM does not
exist!
Nevertheless, those who take the view
that there is no such thing as STM still
talk about WM (e.g., Brown et al., 2007),
suggesting that a general consensus is that
WM includes processes that are not related
to short-term storage.
Another problem with suggesting
developing more tasks is that such a focus
may fall prey to the criticism of circularity.
That is, one creates a “simple” task that
only requires storage, a “complex” task
that requires additional processes, and
then uses these tasks to show differential
correlation patterns between the tasks and
some cognitive ability. By design, the tasks
will follow a WM = STM + X format.
Showing that the STM component or the
X component correlates with fluid intelli-
gence, reasoning, or language ability, does
not say anything about the natures of and
distinction between STM of WM. The dis-
tinction is already built in by the choice of
tasks.
Aben et al. acknowledge that the sim-
plicity of tacking on a secondary task to
a simple span task has led to a prolif-
eration of WM tasks. Yet, different WM
tasks do not load on a single WM con-
struct (Miyake et al., 2000). The explana-
tion is that WM is composed of distinct
processes (Baddeley, 1996; Miyake et al.,
2000). However, this defeats the purpose
of creating a complex span task to mea-
sure WM capacity, as it would require
the development of several complex span
tasks measuring capacities of “shifting,”
www.frontiersin.org January 2013 | Volume 4 | Article 13 | 1
Davelaar STM as a WM process
“inhibition,” “updating,” “dual tasking,”
and so on.
A more severe problem with following
labeled statistical latent variables is the dis-
regard of procedural similarity. For exam-
ple, Engle et al.’s (1999) WM and STM
latent constructs are perfectly confounded
with the dual-task and single-task require-
ment of the component tasks, respectively.
This is also the case when the modal-
ity of presentation is taken into account
(Kane et al., 2004). In fact Oberauer et al.
(2012), presented a computational model
that captures the Kane et al. (2004) data
without recourse to different processing
capacities. In their model, the statistical
latent constructs truly represent different
behavioral patterns due to task-procedural
differences and not due to different latent
cognitive constructs. Hence, developing
new complex span tasks would not pro-
vide evidence for separate WM and STM
constructs.
CONCLUSION
The review by Aben et al. highlights a
rough edge in the STM/WM literature,
but focuses too much on the most impure
part of the STM/WM distinction, the span
tasks. The distinction between STM and
WM and, more importantly, their interre-
lationship becomes clear at the theoretical
level, but task impurity will plague any
correlational study. Addressing the distinc-
tion at the theoretical level allows honing
in on the questions that speak directly to
the nature and mechanism of STM/WM
and provide directions toward more suit-
able approaches.
REFERENCES
Aben, B., Stapert, S., and Blokland, A. (2012). About
the distinction between working memory and
short-term memory. Front. Psychology 3:301. doi:
10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00301
Atkinson, R. C., and Shiffrin, R. M. (1968). “Human
memory: a proposed system and its control
processes,” in The Psychology of Learning and
Motivation, Vol. 2, eds K. W. Spence and J. T.
Spence (New York, NY: Academic Press), 89–195.
Baddeley, A. D. (1966). The influence of acoustic
and semantic similarity on long-term memory for
word sequences. Q. J. Exp. Psychol. 18, 302–309.
Baddeley, A. D. (1996). Exploring the cen-
tral executive. Q. J. Exp. Psychol. 49,
5–28.
Baddeley, A. D., Gathercole, S., and Papagno,
C. (1998). The phonological loop as a lan-
guage learning device. Psychol. Rev. 105,
158–173.
Baddeley, A. D., and Hitch, G. (1974). “Working
memory,” in The Psychology of Learning and
Motivation: Advances in Research and Theory,
Vol. 6, ed G. H. Bower (New York, NY: Academic
Press), 47–90.
Barrouillet, P., Bernardin, S., Portrat, S., Vergauwe, E.,
and Camos, V. (2007). Time and cognitive load
in working memory. J. Exp. Psychol. Learn. Mem.
Cogn. 33, 570–585.
Brown, G. D. A., Neath, I., and Chater, N. (2007).
A temporal ratio model of memory. Psychol. Rev.
114, 539–576.
Crowder, R. G. (1982). Short-term memory: where do
we stand? Mem. Cognit. 21, 142–145.
Davelaar, E. J., Goshen-Gottstein, Y., Askenazi,
A., Haarmann, H. J., and Usher, M. (2005).
The demise of short-term memory revisited:
empirical and computational investiga-
tions of recency effects. Psychol. Rev. 112,
3–42.
Engle, R. W., Tuholski, S. W., Laughlin, J. E., and
Conway, A. R. A. (1999). Working memory, short-
term memory, and general fluid intelligence: a
latent-variable approach. J. Exp. Psychol. Gen. 128,
309–331.
Greene, R. L. (1986). Sources of recency effects in free
recall. Psychol. Bull. 99, 221–228.
Howard, M. W., and Kahana, M. J. (2002). A
distributed representation of temporal context.
J. Math. Psychol. 46, 269–299.
Kane, M. J., Hambrick, D. Z., Tuholski, S. W.,
Wilhelm, O., Payne, T.W., and Engle, R.W. (2004).
The generality of working memory capacity: a
latent-variable approach to verbal and visuospatial
memory span and reasoning. J. Exp. Psychol. Gen.
133, 189–217.
Lewandowsky, S., Oberauer, K., and Brown, G.
D. A. (2009). No temporal decay in verbal
short-term memory. Trends Cogn. Sci. 13,
120–126.
Miyake, A., Friedman, N. P., Emerson, M. J., Witzki,
A. H., Howerter, A., and Wager, T. D. (2000).
The unity and diversity of executive functions
and their contributions to complex “frontal lobe”
tasks: a latent variable analysis. Cogn. Psychol. 41,
49–100.
Norman, D. A. (1968). Toward a theory of
memory and attention. Psychol. Rev. 75,
522–536.
Oberauer, K., Lewandowsky, S., Farrell, S., Jarrold,
C., and Greaves, M. (2012). Modeling working
memory: an interference model of complex span.
Psychon. Bull. Rev. 19, 779–819.
Shiffrin, R. M. (1976). “Capacity limitations in
information in information processing, atten-
tion and memory,” in Handbook of Learning
and Cognitive Processes. Vol. 4, Attention and
Memory, ed W. K. Estes (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum),
177–236.
Received: 10 October 2012; accepted: 07 January 2013;
published online: 31 January 2013.
Citation: Davelaar EJ (2013) Short-term memory as a
workingmemory control process. Front. Psychology 4:13.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00013
This article was submitted to Frontiers in Cognition, a
specialty of Frontiers in Psychology.
Copyright © 2013 Davelaar. This is an open-access
article distributed under the terms of the Creative
Commons Attribution License, which permits use, dis-
tribution and reproduction in other forums, provided
the original authors and source are credited and sub-
ject to any copyright notices concerning any third-party
graphics etc.
Frontiers in Psychology | Cognition January 2013 | Volume 4 | Article 13 | 2


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Short-term memory as a working memory control process

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