The past 10 years have brought near-revolutionary changes in psychological theories about short-term memory, with similarly great advances in the neurosciences. Here, we critically examine the major psychological theories (the "mind") of short-term memory and how they relate to evidence about underlying brain mechanisms. We focus on three features that must be addressed by any satisfactory theory of short-term memory. First, we examine the evidence for the architecture of short-term memory, with special attention to questions of capacity and how--or whether--short-term memory can be separated from long-term memory. Second, we ask how the components of that architecture enact processes of encoding, maintenance, and retrieval. Third, we describe the debate over the reason about forgetting from short-term memory, whether interference or decay is the cause. We close with a conceptual model tracing the representation of a single item through a short-term memory task, describing the biological mechanisms that might support psychological processes on a moment-by-moment basis as an item is encoded, maintained over a delay with some forgetting, and ultimately retrieved.

中文翻译：

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短期记忆的思想和大脑。

在过去的十年中，有关短期记忆的心理学理论发生了近乎革命性的变化，神经科学领域也取得了类似的重大进步。在这里，我们批判性地研究了短期记忆的主要心理学理论（“思想”），以及它们与潜在的脑机制证据之间的关系。我们关注于任何令人满意的短期记忆理论都必须解决的三个特征。首先，我们检查短期记忆体系结构的证据，并特别注意容量问题以及如何将短期记忆与长期记忆区分开来。其次，我们询问该架构的组件如何制定编码，维护和检索过程。第三，我们描述关于短期记忆中忘记的原因的辩论，是干扰还是衰变是原因。我们以一个概念模型作为结束语，该模型通过短期记忆任务来跟踪单个项目的表示，描述了在对项目进行编码时可能瞬间支持心理过程的生物学机制，并在一定程度上保持了延迟忘记了，最终找回了。