On the short-term retention of serial, tactile stimuli

In three experiments using the short-term memory distractor paradigm, Ss attempted to remember which three or four phalanges of the left hand had been stimulated and in what order. The experiments showed that forgetting increased as a function of trials, that such proactive effects could be eliminated by separating the successive trials by several minutes, that both verbal and nonverbal distractor tasks impaired retention, and that forgetting reached a maximum in approximately 6 sec. All of these results concur with those generally obtained for the short-term retention of verbal material. In addition, it was shown that the tactile recall was significantly poorer after an arithmetic distractor task presented visually than after the same task presented aurally. This result suggests an overlap between the mechanisms of tactile retention and the mechanisms of vision.