438 Sensory and Working Memory possible to generate precise and sometimes novel predictions For example, the primacy model predicts a unique and interesting kind of output error called a fill-in error It turns out that when people miss an item in the recall sequence, as when they fail to recall the letter B in the second serial position, there is a significant tendency to report the missed item in the next serial position (i.e., as occurring in Position 3) Page and Norris (1998) argue that the assumptions of the primacy model correctly predict this tendency, whereas other models not (although see Neath, Kelley, & Surprenant, 2001) The connectionist model of Burgess and Hitch (1999) also attempts to formalize the operation of the phonological loop Serial recall is more clearly cue-driven in this model, rather than based on activation levels, and the cues in this case are elements of a moving or drifting context signal List items are associated with a snapshot of the context, which is set at the moment an item is presented Adjacent items, because the context signal is slow-moving, tend to be associated to similar contextual cues, which helps to explain, in part, why people tend to transpose adjacent items in recall output At the point of recall, the context signal is reset, and a competitive selection process proceeds based partly on the activations that items receive via their connections with the context The Burgess and Hitch (1999) model also assumes that connections exist between phonemic information and to-berecalled items This phonemic layer, when activated, serves essentially as the analogue for the phonological store in the working memory model Rehearsal strengthens otherwise decaying connections between the phonemic layer and items, thereby helping to account for phenomena such as the word length effect Again, the details are beyond the scope of this chapter, but the model nicely handles a variety of phenomena in immediate retention, including the occurrence of soundbased errors, the effects of articulatory suppression, and even temporal grouping effects (see also Hitch et al., 1996) Another recently developed hybrid model is the Start-End model of Henson (1998) Once again, the major assumptions of the standard juggler model are reproduced in the form of decaying representations that are refreshed through internal rehearsal The locus of the word length effect, and the general relationship between articulation rate and span, is placed in the trade-off between rehearsal and decay The unique aspect of the Start-End model is its machinery for handling the recovery of serial order Henson (1998) assumes that, during presentation, list items are coded relative to the start and end of the list Items near the beginning of the list are associated more strongly with a beginning-of-the-list start marker, and recency items more strongly with an end marker These position codes are then reinstated at test and used to activate associated items, and an item is selected for recall Because of the nature of the position codes, adjacent items tend to be associated with overlapping cues, leading to systematic error gradients in recall The Henson (1998) model, like the other hybrid models, can be shown to mimic the major phenomena of immediate retention Unitary Models The second class of simulation model, the unitary models, typically rejects decay and rehearsal as the major determinants of immediate memory performance As noted earlier in the chapter, there are both empirical and theoretical reasons to question whether decay and rehearsal are viable explanatory constructs in immediate retention Although people certainly rehearse, and rehearsal can play a role in unitary models, its role in unitary models is not to refresh otherwise decaying representations Instead, rehearsal is typically viewed as another kind of stimulus presentation, which can, depending on the circumstance, either facilitate or interfere with subsequent retention (see G D A Brown et al., 2000; Tan & Ward, 2000) In the OSCAR model (which stands for OSCillator-based Associative Recall), forgetting is caused entirely by various forms of interference (G D A Brown et al., 2000) By relying on interference and rejecting decay, OSCAR shares an important property with most conceptions of how forgetting occurs in long-term memory (see Crowder, 1976; Neath, 1998) In a fashion similar to the Burgess and Hitch (1999) model, associations are formed between to-be-recalled items and snapshots of a moving context signal (instantiated through sets of slow and fast temporal oscillators) The context is reset for recall, and there is cue-driven competition for output Interference in the model occurs because of response competition during the selection process, output interference, and inherent capacity limitations in the storage mechanism that is employed (see Brown et al for details) Regarding rehearsal, the OSCAR model includes no active mechanism for the rehearsal of items during list presentation Although its authors did consider the possibility of strategic rehearsal, the concept was rejected because, essentially, “we have found no need for it in accounting for the phenomena under consideration” (G D A Brown et al., 2000, p 172) With regard to decay, the concept is rejected for many of the same reasons discussed earlier in the chapter—that is, certain data seem antagonistic to the proposal of decay—but also because OSCAR is designed to explain data from both short- and long-term retention environments Indeed, OSCAR fits data from retention intervals lasting seconds as well as it fits data from intervals lasting hours, without changing any of its main assumptions Conclusions A similar characteristic is found in the perturbation model of Estes (1972, 1997), an early simulation model that strongly influenced the development of OSCAR In the perturbation model, items are effectively represented as values along dimensions, such as temporal or spatial position The organization can be hierarchical, meaning that an item might be represented in terms of its position along an ordered list, within-list, or within-group dimension (see Lee & Estes, 1981; Nairne, 1991) The crux of the model is the assumption that the position values are subject to random perturbations over time: That is, there is a certain probability that each represented value will drift along its position dimension The probability that a perturbation will occur can be specified mathematically, and the model has been shown to generate precise predictions about correct and incorrect performance For example, the model does an excellent job of explaining the nature of errors in immediate serial recall As noted earlier, when people make errors in ordered recall, items tend to be placed incorrectly in nearby positions, and there is a regular gradient found as distance increases from the item’s original position (see Healy, 1974) The perturbation model not only generates these errors, but it also specifies exactly how the gradients should change as retention intervals increase The model also nicely handles empirical dissociations between item and order memory, particularly the different forms of the serial position curve that have been reported (see Healy, 1974) Moreover, as Nairne (1991, 1992) has shown, essentially the same assumptions that handle data from immediate serial recall can also fit data across retention intervals lasting minutes or hours (although see Healy & McNamara, 1996, for some qualifying arguments) Thus, the perturbation model can be viewed as a unitary model, explaining both short- and long-term memory performance, and neither rehearsal nor fixed decay assumptions are needed to fit the data (Estes, 1997; Nairne, 1991) The final model that I discuss is my own feature model (Nairne, 1988, 1990, 2001; Neath & Nairne, 1995) All forgetting in the feature model is attributed to interference, either from feature overwriting or from incorrect interpretation of the primary memory trace Rehearsal can play a role in the model, as a mechanism for effectively re-presenting list items, but rehearsal plays no real role in producing standard immediate memory phenomena such as the word length effect or even the effects of articulatory suppression on performance (see also Neath, 2000) The model assumes that residual remnants of perceptual processing remain in primary memory after list presentation These primary memory traces are represented as vectors of features and can be overwritten, based on similarity, by subsequent list items At the point of recall, surviving traces exist in a degraded or blurry form and 439 must be interpreted prior to recall Most of the interesting effects of immediate retention arise out of the interpretation process The feature model has been applied successfully to most of the standard phenomena of immediate memory, including the modality and suffix effects One of its most important assumptions is the idea that the trace interpretation process is guided by the presence or absence of distinctive features Correct performance hinges on the presence of features in the degraded trace that uniquely specify one of the possible recall candidates To the extent that primary memory traces contain features that are matched in all of the presented items, such as a common sound or phoneme, performance suffers It is this characteristic of the model that explains the phonological similarity effect, as well as long-standing phenomena such as the von Restorff effect (see Kelley & Nairne, 2001) More importantly, the trace interpretation process is assumed to resemble the kinds of cue-driven retrieval processes that guide all forms of remembering, regardless of the time scales involved (see Nairne, 2002) The feature model, like the other unitary models discussed, assigns no special mnemonic laws or properties (such as decay) to remembering over the short term CONCLUSIONS Transient memories, discussed here in the form of sensory and short-term memory, clearly serve highly adaptive functions in human cognitive processing Sensory memories enable us to prolong the present, for the briefest of intervals; short-term memories comprise the ingredients of conscious awareness and play a vital role, among other things, in the comprehension and production of spoken language Compared to the study of long-term retention, studying transient memories is a relatively recent enterprise, commencing with full vigor only in the second half of the twentieth century As we have seen, many issues remain unresolved, and fundamental controversies continue Does short-term retention follow its own unique operating laws? 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