Working Memory

[Jerry.Ball at williams.af.mil]

memory), he argues that "working memory cannot just consist of the nodes in
long-term memory that are activated in current processing."  His argument
hinges on "the problem of 2".  In the sentence "the big star's beside the
little star" the word "star" occurs twice.   "These two instances cannot be
kept distinct if each consists simply of an activation of the lexical entry
for star in long-term memory."

Based on this, Jackendoff argues that the "older view (e.g. Neisser 1967,
Baddeley 1986) of working memory as a separate facility in the brain appears
more appropriate...If we don't like the idea of 'copying' material into
working memory, an alternative way to think about it might be that working
memory is a set of indices or pointers or transient bindings to long-term
memory."

I have myself been working on the development of a language processing model
that uses a "circular stack" to retain the chunks created during language
processing.  However, I don't directly use the chunks in the stack, rather,
I use them as a template for retrieving chunks from long-term memory
(effectively treating them as pointers to long-term memory).  

Assuming something along the lines of Jackendoff's proposal, do the
arguments against a separate short-term memory still hold?

Jerry

Jerry T. Ball, PhD
L3 Communications, Link Simulation & Training
Air Force Research Lab
6030 S. Kent Street, Mesa, AZ 85212-6061
480-988-9773 ext. 457
jerry.ball at williams.af.mil