Issues of Representation and Limited Capacity in the Auditory Short-term Store

This article makes several related claims about the auditory short-term store (ASTS) tested by immediate ordered recall. The first claim is that the representation in ASTS is uncategorical and unparsed. The second claim is that there is a stage of recovery just prior to recall, in which the information in ASTS is parsed and categorized. Finally, it is proposed that the amount of representational medium in ASTS is fixed and allocated proportionally to each item in the presentation. When too many items are presented, the items are not represented with sufficient fidelity to be recovered, leading to the phenomenon of limited capacity. These claims are contrasted to the predictions of a slot model, in which ASTS is hypothesized to store a fixed number of categorical and parsed items. Novel explanations are given for several phenomena in immediate ordered recall, including the Hebb effect, the correlation between perceptibility and capacity, and serial position curves.