From Brown-Peterson to continual distractor via operation span: A SIMPLE account of complex span

Surprenant, Aimée M. and Neath, Ian and VanWormer, Lisa A. and Bireta, T. J. (2014) From Brown-Peterson to continual distractor via operation span: A SIMPLE account of complex span. Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 68 (3). pp. 204-211. ISSN 1878-7290

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Abstract

Three memory tasks—Brown-Peterson, complex span, and continual distractor—all alternate presentation of a to-be-remembered item and a distractor activity, but each task is associated with a different memory system, short-term memory, working memory, and long-term memory, respectively. SIMPLE, a relative local distinctiveness model, has previously been fit to data from both the Brown-Peterson and continual distractor tasks; here we use the same version of the model to fit data from a complex span task. Despite the many differences between the tasks, including unpredictable list length, SIMPLE fit the data well. Because SIMPLE posits a single memory system, these results constitute yet another demonstration that performance on tasks originally thought to tap different memory systems can be explained without invoking multiple memory systems.

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