Short term motor retention as a function of response-similarity

The present study examined short-term retention in a simple leverpositioning task. The basic variables were the degree of similarity of prior responses about a target (± 5 deg., ± 15 deg., and ± 25 deg.) and the length of retention interval (5, 15, and 50 sec.). It was found that the absolute errors at recall were inversely related to the similarity of the prior responses about the target position. In all conditions, forgetting was found to be an increasing function of the retention interval. The loss of retention over short periods of time was interpreted as being consistent with verbal short-term memory studies. The results on the similarity of responses were in direct opposition to the findings usually observed in verbal tasks. Comparisons with verbal responses are difficult to make since the nature of retention measurement is different in verbal tasks.