Short-Term Memory

When Jonides and colleagues at the University of Michigan set out to examine “The Mind and Brain of Short-Term Memory” (2007), they had their work cut out for them—even considering the nearly 40 pages they had to use. Given this ambitious goal, their review is necessarily somewhat cursory, but they clearly strived to provide multiple angles to different facets of short-term memory. Still, by focusing almost entirely on the mind and brain of humans, the authors have left out angles perhaps very critical for understanding not just how memory works, but perhaps even for how it came to be. Early on, the authors rightly point out—quantitatively even—that Baddeley’s model has become the mainstream theory of human short-term memory. Jonides and colleagues present Baddeley’s model as a set of separate buffers for verbal, visuospatial, and episodic information (2007). Unfortunately, they do not pursue any exploration of the differences between these, and instead draw a series of dichotomies where the focus does not leave the verbal for any appreciable time. Admittedly, the Baddeley model emphasizes the importance of verbal ability, as it is understood most as a way for the mind to use a “phonological loop”; we give ourselves small descriptions of things using words, which allows us to store or retrieve chunks of information (Pinker, 2002). But even if we admit that short-term memory is mostly verbal, the review article seriously neglects the implications regarding that this still means it isn’t entirely verbal.
And if short-term memory isn’t an entirely verbal phenomenon, then it isn’t an entirely human phenomenon, either. Here too, the Jonides et al. article overlooks where it should emphasize. There is no dearth of animal models for short-term memory. Rats have long been used to study short-term memory loss accompanying Alzheimer’s disease (Morgan, et al., 2000) and normal aging (Wallace, Krauter, & Campbell, 1980). And for half a century experimenters have used

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