ABSTRACT
Although we have not been working with Atkinson and Shiffrin’s (1968) buffer model, our research addressed a fundamental distinction raised by their model, namely the distinction between short-term store (STS) and long-term store (LTS). Likewise, our research has addressed the control process that played a central role in the buffer model, namely the rehearsal process. Unlike Atkinson and Shiffrin, we distinguish between an active rehearsal process, which brings information into LTS, and a passive rehearsal process, which maintains information in STS. Our guiding theoretical framework has been the perturbation model of immediate memory originally proposed by Estes (1972; see Estes, 1997, for the most recent version of this model and see Lee, 1992, for a helpful summary). As originally proposed, this mathematical model included only a single memory store comparable to STS and a single passive rehearsal process. However, the findings of our research document and underline the need to add to the model a second memory store comparable to LTS, which allows for a distinction between active and passive rehearsal processes.
