creators_name: Tarnow, Eugen type: preprint datestamp: 2005-05-02 lastmod: 2011-03-11 08:55:59 metadata_visibility: show title: Properties of the Short Term Memory Structure subjects: brain-img subjects: neuro-neu subjects: neuro-anat full_text_status: public keywords: short term memory, reaction time, search time, search speed abstract: Properties of a short term memory structure are discovered in the data of Rubin, Hinton and Wenzel (1999): Cued-recall probability and search time are linearly related from 6 seconds to 666 seconds after stimulus presentation with a zero probability of cued-recall at 2.6 seconds and a 100% recall probability at 1.3 seconds. This linear relationship defines a short term memory structure which is a moving structure: the memory structure travels away from the starting point of the search (suggesting that the starting points of the search and storage are the same), decaying with a rate proportional to the time it takes to find the structure. The travel speed is slower than Brownian motion. The incorrect recall time saturates, giving an upper limit for the number of neurons involved in the short term memory structure of 3*108 using an interneuron transfer time or 4 msecs or 3*106 using an neuron-neuron transfer time of 20msecs. date: 2005-04 date_type: published refereed: FALSE referencetext: 1. Neath, I (1998). “Human Memory”. Brooks/Cole. Pacific Grove. P. 54. 2. Cowan, N (2000). “The magical number 4 in short-term memory: A reconsideration of mental storage capacity”, BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES 24, 87–185. 3. Saul Sternberg (1966) “High-speed scanning in human memory”, Science. 1966 Aug 5;153(736):652-4. 4. Rubin, D.C., Wenzel, A.E. (1996) “One Hundred Years of Forgetting: A Quantitative Description of Retention”, Psychological Review, Vol 103, No. 4, 743-760. 5. Rubin, D.C., Hinton, S., Wenzel, A., (1999), “The Precise Time Course of Retention”, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, Vol 25, No. 5, 1161-1176. 6. Chip Quinn, personal communication. 7. Sougné, J. (1999) INFERNET: A neurocomputational model of binding and inference. doctoral dissertation, University of Liège. Collection PAIn°7, http://www.ulg.ac.be/cogsci/jsougne/JSougneThesis.pdf, p. 23. 8. Ratcliff, R. (1978). A theory of memory retrieval. Psychological Review, 85, 59-108. citation: Tarnow, Dr. Eugen (2005) Properties of the Short Term Memory Structure. [Preprint] document_url: http://cogprints.org/4273/1/The_structure_of_short_term_memory_-_Tarnow.pdf