Automatic and Effortful Components of Maintenance Rehearsal.

Abstract

There is currently a debate about the role of rote repetitive rehearsal (called type I or maintenance rehearsal) in the establishment of long-term memory traces. While some studies show that maintenance rehearsal enhances long-term memory performance, others show no such effect. The contradictory results are shown to be largely the result of deficiencies in the methodologies employed. Studies using more appropriate methodologies (e.g., Glenberg, Smith and Green, 1977; Glenberg and Adams, 1977, and Naveh-Benjamin and Jonides, 1981) have shown a systematic effect of maintenance rehearsal on recognition memory. This effect seems to be accounted for only by the first few rehearsals in a sequence (Naveh-Benjamin and Jonides, 1981, the Geiselman and Bjork, 1980). A model is developed which distinguishes between two stages in the rehearsal process. The first stage is hypothesized to involve preparatory activities that subjects use to establish a rehearsal loop. This component is assumed to require effortful activity to access a motor program for the sequence to be rehearsed, to load this program into a rehearsal buffer, and to execute and stereotype the program during the first several rehearsals. The second component is hypothesized to be more automatic in nature. It involves repetitive execution of the rehearsal program until it is no longer needed. According to the model, it is only the first component, whose operation is assumed to require effort and voluntary control, that results in the creation of long-term memory traces. Three experiments were conducted to test the model by applying multiple empirical criteria to establish whether two processing stages, and effortful and an automatic one, combine to make-up maintenance rehearsal. The experiments compared maintenance and elaborative rehearsal. The second stage in maintenance rehearsal was shown to have no measurable effect on long-term memory, and it was shown to dem and less cognitive capacity, to be more stereotyped, and to be more resistant to interruption, in comparison to the first stage.