The DOI matches its Crossref record; 145 of the 145 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Short-term memory and long-term memory are still different.
Open accessAbstract
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. (PsycINFO Database Record
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
James, W. (1913) · Henry Holt and Company eBooks · doi:10.1037/11059-000 · Cited by 25,226
The episodic buffer: a new component of working memory?
Baddeley, A. (2000) · Trends in Cognitive Sciences · doi:10.1016/s1364-6613(00)01538-2 · Cited by 7,359 · cited 19×
“One straightforward way of achieving this can be found in connectionist models of immediate serial recall that are based on forming associations between item representations and representations of list position (e.g., Burgess & Hitch, 1992; Brown, Preece, & Hulme, 2000).”
BackgroundMethodInfluentialLOSS OF RECENT MEMORY AFTER BILATERAL HIPPOCAMPAL LESIONS
Scoville, W. B., & Milner, B. (1957) · Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry · doi:10.1136/jnnp.20.1.11 · Cited by 7,322
Human Memory: A Proposed System and its Control Processes
Atkinson, R. C., & Shiffrin, R. M. (1968) · Psychology of Learning and Motivation · doi:10.1016/s0079-7421(08)60422-3 · Cited by 7,216
Marr, D. (1982) · Cumulative Index of Computer Aided Architectural Design · Cited by 5,733
Barlow, H. B. (1983) · Journal of Mathematical Psychology · doi:10.1016/0022-2496(83)90030-5 · Cited by 5,424
Baddeley, A. (1992) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.1736359 · Cited by 5,258
(1983) · Cited by 5,041
A capacity theory of comprehension: individual differences in working memory
Just, M. A., & Carpenter, P. A. (1992) · Psychological Review · doi:10.1037/0033-295x.99.1.122 · Cited by 4,153
The capacity of visual working memory for features and conjunctions
Luck, S. J., & Vogel, E. K. (1997) · Nature · doi:10.1038/36846 · Cited by 4,071
Cited by
Individual differences in long-term memory.
Unsworth, N. (2019) · Psychological Bulletin · doi:10.1037/bul0000176 · Cited by 99
Liu, S., Wu, Z., He, Z., Chen, W., Zhong, X., Guo, B., Liu, S., Duan, H., Guo, Y., Zeng, J., et al. (2024) · ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces · doi:10.1021/acsami.4c04398 · Cited by 34
Can short-term memory be trained?
Norris, D. G., Hall, J., & Gathercole, S. E. (2019) · Memory & Cognition · doi:10.3758/s13421-019-00901-z · Cited by 31
Self-citationGershman, S. J., Fiete, I., & Irie, K. (2025) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2501.02950 · Cited by 21
The Cooperative Neuron: Cellular Foundations of Mental Life
Phillips, W. A. (2023) · doi:10.1093/oso/9780198876984.001.0001 · Cited by 13
Metadata
- Authors
- Norris, D.
- Venue
- Psychological Bulletin
- Published
- 2017-09
- Volume
- 143
- Issue
- 9
- Pages
- 992-1009
- ISSN
- 0033-2909 (ISSN-L)
- 1939-1455
- OpenAlex
- W2619402516
- Cited by
- 256
- References
- 145
- FWCI
- 7.44
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Short-term memory and long-term memory are still different. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1037/bul0000108
- The paper
- Norris, D. (2017). Short-term memory and long-term memory are still different. Psychological Bulletin. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000108
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.