ABSTRACT
As Crowder noted, the momentary distraction and subsequent loss of very recent information is a vivid real-life episode. The advent of cognitivism and its conception of mind as an information-processing device turned the attention of psychologists to short-term memory as a system able to temporarily make recent information available for treatment. The research stream initiated by Brown and Peterson and Peterson studies aimed at establishing the existence of short-term memory as a valid memory system. The second SOB hypothesis, according to which increasing the number of changing distractors in complex bursts involves more interference and lower recall, was tested in comparing the effect on recall of changing bursts containing either two or four distractors. Woodman et al showed that visual search tasks do not impair the maintenance of information in working memory, even within the visual domain.
