Arthur W. Melton

IMPLICATIONS OF SHORT-TERM MEMORY FOR A GENERAL THEORY OF MEMORY,

Abstract : A dichotomy of human memory into immediate memory and long-term memory (associative memory, habit) has been widely accepted for many years and has been formally stated by some theorists. This assumed dichotomy of the phenomena of short-term memory and long-term memory is examined and rejected in this paper. First, a number of current issues in learning theory are restated as issues about the formation, storage, and retrieval of memory traces, and the major issue is identified as the question whether short-term memory and long- term memory are points on a continuum, or a dichotomy. Then this major issue is examined in the light of data from recent studies in which the recall of single to-be-remembered alphanumeric items followed a single or very few repetitions. Finally, the issue is examined in the light of new data that relate the slope of the short-term forgetting curve to the number of elements or recoded chunks in the to-be-remembered unit, and also new data that confirm and extend Hebbs finding that there is a specific accumulative strengthening effect of repetitions in the immediate memory situation involving to-be-remembered units beyond the span of immediate memory of human subjects. The principal consequence of the conclusion that a continuum, rather than a dichotomy, is involved in short-term and longterm memory is the rejection of the postulate of autonomous decay of traces in the case of shortterm memory and acceptance of the postulate of permanence of traces, once formed, throughout all varieties of memory. (Author)

The situation with respect to the spacing of repetitions and memory.

The revival of interest in the effectiveness of spaced practice, as compared with massed practice, in learning is attributed to the abandonment of the constraints of serial and pairedassociate list learning and the discovery of stable benefits from spaced practice in continuous paired-associate learning, short-term memory for individual items, and single-trial free-recall learning. Comments are made about the preceding symposium papers by Underwood, Waugh, and Greeno,,and some data on the differential effects of spacing of repetitions in freerecall learning are introduced in an effort to assess the current state of fact and theory.

Visitor Behavior in Museums: Some Early Research in Environmental Design

In 1930-32 Arthur W. Melton was a research associate of the American Association of Museums. The first part of what follows is a slightly edited portion of the summary chapter of the monograph he wrote to describe experiments at the Pennsylvania Museum of Art in Philadelphia. The research, directed by E. S. Robinson of Yale, was funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Melton received his Ph.D. at Yale in 1932, and in the following two years as a research assistant there he supervised a training program for research in several museums. The second part of what follows is a somewhat shortened version of an article he wrote about studies at the Museum of Science and Industry in New York City. The permission of Melton and the American Association of Museums to reproduce this pioneering work on environmental design is gratefully acknowledged.

The Ranschburg Phenomenon: Failures of immediate recall correlated with repetition of elements within a stimulus

Seven-consonant stimuli were recalled immediately. When the consonant in Position 2 was repeated in Position 5, 6, or 7, an increase in errors occurred at the latter position, as compared with control stimuli involving no repetition. Confirmation of the Ranschburg Phenomenon does not occur, however, when the repeated-element positions are 2 and 4. Nor was there an increased error rate for elements following a repeated element. These observations support the importance of intra-stimulus interference in immediate memory, but leave uncertain the associative mechanism responsible for such interference.

The Taxonomy of Human Learning: Overview

Publisher Summary This chapter presents the traditional categories of human learning from the vantage point of expertness in each category. This involves both the identification of similarities and differences among categories—with stress on similarities, in view of the traditional implication of category differences— and the identification of similarities and differences within a category—with stress on differences, in view of the traditional implication of category homogeneity. The sophisticated investigator and theorist in human learning has for many years stressed the overlap of certain categories and the necessary distinctions among forms of learning commonly included within a category. Nevertheless, there are reasons for believing that the further consideration of the validity of the traditional categories of human learning is not the further beating of a dead horse. First, among these reasons is the observation that the elementary textbooks in psychology, which are presumed to treat the fundamentals of the science, are quite confused and confusing in regard to these traditional categories of learning.

The concept of coding in learning-memory theory

The concept of coding, which refers to what is stored in memory during learning, is defended, as an important and necessary conceptual advance in learning-memory theory during the last decade. It is maintained that the concept covers a wide variety of functionally different coding operations, with many specifics of its operation still to be experimentally determined, and that attempts to restrict its meaning to arbitrary transformational coding, as suggested by Restle, should be rejected. The paper comments on the empirical contributions to coding theory by Johnson, Wickens, Martin, and Postman and Bums in the symposium for which it served a discussant function.