Arousal and Information Selection in Short-term Memory

Abstract

IN experiments on short-term, memory a subject is typically presented with a list of items such as words or digits and then asked to recall the complete list in order of presentation. This simple paradigm has produced many important findings about the nature of the information-handling mechanism in memory. In most cases, however, the problem of short-term memory is assumed only to involve storage and retrieval of information, and no allowance is made for the subject's freedom to attend selectively to the incoming stream of information. In other words, some of the information presented may never be admitted to storage at all—a possibility that is particularly relevant to recent research^1–4 on the interaction between memory processes and arousal, because we have found^5,6 that arousal is a major determinant of changes in patterns of information selection in visual monitoring tasks. In loud noise, subjects attend more to sources of information of “high priority” and are more likely to disregard sources of less important information.