Fast Presentation Rates and the Recall of Item and Order Information

Abstract

SEVERAL investigators have suggested recently that there are two stages in short-term memory—a fast decaying buffer store and a more stable and organized store resulting from scanning, rehearsing and encoding operations^1–3. In this context, rate of presentation should have two effects. Fast rates, for example, minimize the effective decay in the buffer store but at the same time reduce the opportunity for rehearsal. Posner⁴ also suggests that increasing rate of presentation will show improved recall only in tasks which minimize the importance of retrieval strategies.