Recall performance is also better when all of the words in a list are taken from a single semantic category (such as games) than when the words are taken from different categories. More words can be recalled when the words are highly familiar or occur frequently in the language. For example, the ability to recall words in order depends on a number of characteristics of these words: fewer words can be recalled when the words have longer spoken duration this is known as the word-length effect, or when their speech sounds are similar to each other this is called the phonological similarity effect. More recent research has shown that this 'magical number seven' is roughly accurate for college students recalling lists of digits, but memory span varies widely with populations tested and with material used. In an early and highly influential article, The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two, psychologist George Miller suggested that human short-term memory has a forward memory span of approximately seven items plus or minus two and that that was well known at the time (it seems to go back to the 19th-century researcher Wundt). Bjork and Whitten hypothesized that these results could be attributed to the memory processes at work for long-term memory retrieval versus short-term memory retrieval. These results would seem inconsistent with the idea of short-term memory as the distractor items would have taken the place of some of the word-pairs in the buffer, thereby weakening the associated strength of the items in long-term memory.
In their results, Bjork and Whitten found that the recency effect (the increased probability of recall of the last items studied) and the primacy effect (the increased probability of recall of the first few items) still remained. After the final word-pair, subjects had to do the multiplication distractor task for 20 seconds.
Whitten presented subjects with word pairs to be remembered however, before and after each word pair, subjects had to do a simple multiplication task for 12 seconds. Further evidence against the existence of a short-term memory store comes from experiments involving continual distractor tasks.
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