ABSTRACT
When people think about memory, they typically think about retaining knowledge over long periods of time. When most people speak of short-term memory, they often refer to remembering over a few hours or days. However, for cognitive psychologists, memory in the short term means much briefer spans of time, often less than a minute. What is the point of studying such fleeting memories? Aren’t changes in the world from one moment to the next rather trivial? Well, no. Without these short-term memories, we would live in the permanent, absolute present-the eternal now. Language as we know it would not be possible. You would not be able to watch a film. Much of the world involves events that are spread out over time. Take the example of hearing a word. If you think about it, all words are made up of strings of sounds that are occurring at different points in time. To hear this as a whole word, you need to integrate the sounds together. What allows you to do this is the memory of what occurred before, so the information you remember over time helps you link together the sounds to form the whole word.
