Acoustic Confusions and Memory Span for Words

PREDICTION of the short-term memory span for sequences of items has been a crucial problem in testing the value of information theory as a model for remembering. A number of authors1–3 have presented data which show that observed spans fall between predicted values and values which would obtain if span were independent of information per item. In all these cases the underlying assumption made was that if an item was forgotten the alternative items in the vocabulary were available as responses with equal probability.