Introduction

Imagine you are in class. Your professor tells you the page numbers for next week’s reading and then briefly describes what topics will be covered. You start writing down the topics and realize you have no idea what page numbers he said. Looking around, you can tell that many students around you are equally lost, so you put up your hand and ask him to repeat the page numbers. Why is it that you forgot the page numbers so quickly? Short-term memory is limited, and information that isn’t rehearsed is lost. In this Brown-Peterson experiment (so named for the researchers that devised it in the 1950s), you will see for yourself how storing even a small amount of information is difficult if we don’t get to rehearse it.