The role of rehearsal in short-term memory

Several widely accepted models of memory postulate that the adequacy of an item's registration in long-term storage is a positive function of its length of stay in the short-term store. However, when short-term storage times were measured, these times did not predict long-term recall or recognition. Two further experiments showed that neither the length of an item's stay in short-term storage nor the number of overt rehearsals it received was related to subsequent recall. It is concluded that the “maintenance” and “elaborative” aspects of rehearsal can be clearly separated, and that the duration of rehearsal is related to long-term memory and learning only in the latter case. Maintenance rehearsal does not lead to an improvement in memory performance.