Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In recent years connectionist modelling of Short Term Memory (STM) has been a popular subject of research amongst cognitive psychologists. The direct implications in natural language generation and processing, of the speech based phenomena observed in immediate recall STM experiments, make the development of a psychologically plausible STM model very attractive. In this paper we present a connectionist Short Term Store (STS) which is developed using both traditional STM theories of interference and decay trace. The proposed store has all the essential characteristics of human short term memory. It is capable of on-line storage and recall of temporal sequences, it has a limited span, exhibits clear primacy and recency effects, and demonstrates word-length and phonological similarity effects.