Memory plays an important role in intelligent behavior. Modern assessments of cognitive functioning, such as the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS III), include memory tests among other essential measure of mental capability. Modern information-processing conceptions of memory, however, represent a distinct change from the information-reservoir conceptions of memory put forth by earlier researchers such as Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin (1968). This change, a consequence of the shift from using storage metaphors for memory to using computer processing metaphors, has revolutionized scientific understanding of memory and its link to intelligence.

Figure 1

Memory as Information Processing

In their edited volume, Akira Miyake and Priti Shah (1999) integrated the work of leading memory theorists into a consensus definition of memory, which dispenses with the notion of a biochemical filing cabinet in the brain and proposes a multifaceted, working information-processing system whose function is to aid in complex cognition...