ABSTRACT
Over the last 30 years, the study of memory deficits in brain-damaged patients has helped revolutionize our theoretical approach to human memory. Examples included the demonstration of pure and specific long-term memory deficits in amnesic patients (Milner, 1966), deficits that fitted neatly into the distinction between long- and short-term memory emanating from the literature on normal subjects (Baddeley & Warrington, 1970), a distinction that was given further support by evidence from patients with deficits to short-term phonological memory (Shallice & Warrington, 1970). Analysis of such short-term memory deficits was highly influential in the development of the concept of working memory in general, and more specifically in the development of a concept of a phonological loop that has evolved as a system for the acquisition of language (Baddeley, 1992; Gathercole & Baddeley, 1993).
