Capacity and Allocation across Sensory and Short-Term Memories

Human memory consists of sensory memory (SM), short-term memory (STM), and long-term memory (LTM). SM enables a large capacity, but decays rapidly. STM has limited capacity, but lasts longer. The traditional view of these memory systems resembles a leaky hourglass, the large top and bottom portions representing the large capacities of SM and LTM, whereas the narrow portion in the middle represents the limited capacity of STM. The “leak” in the top part of the hourglass depicts the rapid decay of the contents of SM. However, recently, it was shown that major bottlenecks for motion processing exist prior to STM, and the “leaky hourglass” model was replaced by a “leaky flask” model with a narrower top part to capture bottlenecks prior to STM. The leaky flask model was based on data from one study, and the first goal of the current paper was to test if the leaky flask model would generalize by using a different set of data. The second goal of the paper was to explore various block diagram models for memory systems and determine the one best supported by the data. We expressed these block diagram models in terms of statistical mixture models and, by using the Bayesian information criterion (BIC), found that a model with four components, viz., SM, attention, STM, and guessing, provided the best fit to our data. In summary, we generalized previous findings about early qualitative and quantitative bottlenecks, as expressed in the leaky flask model and showed that a four-process model can provide a good explanation for how visual information is processed and stored in memory.