Description:
A commonly expressed view is that short-term memory (STM) is nothing more than activated long-term
memory. If true, this would overturn a central tenet of cognitive psychology—the idea that there are
functionally and neurobiologically distinct short- and long-term stores. Here I present an updated case for
a separation between short- and long-term stores, focusing on the computational demands placed on any
STM system. STM must support memory for previously unencountered information, the storage of
multiple tokens of the same type, and variable binding. None of these can be achieved simply by
activating long-term memory. For example, even a simple sequence of digits such as “1, 3, 1” where there
are 2 tokens of the digit “1” cannot be stored in the correct order simply by activating the representations
of the digits “1” and “3” in LTM. I also review recent neuroimaging data that has been presented as
evidence that STM is activated LTM and show that these data are exactly what one would expect to see
based on a conventional 2-store view