ABSTRACT
Several training situations have been devised in which animals have to base their discriminative behavior upon cues that terminate within a trial before they have the opportunity to make the correct response. The correct response must be guided by the memory of those cues, and the subject must generally ignore the memory of relevant stimuli from preceding trials. This chapter reviews the conceptual status of working memory, especially in relation to other kinds of memory processes. The most popular technique for the study of working memory has been delayed matching to sample. It was introduced by D. S. Blough with pigeons, and has been studied extensively with pigeons by W. A. Roberts and Grant and in monkeys by D'Amato and his associates. Pigeons are normally trained on the matching procedure with a simultaneous display of the sample and comparison stimuli to establish a reliable reference memory for the problem.
