In the Beginning Was the Deed: Verbal Short-Term Memory as Object-Oriented Action

Abstract

Our goal is not to present a new theory of verbal short-term memory (vSTM), but to supplant the concepts used to explain performance on vSTM tasks for some 60 years. We view the concepts of vSTM and its concomitant processes as reifications from observations of performance on these tasks. Millennia of refining, elaborating, and utilizing symbolic systems for representing the putative sounds of speech has seduced researchers into viewing verbal behavior as embodying the hallmarks of these systems, setting verbal material apart from other types of physical material with which people interact. Contrarily, we maintain that verbal material should be seen in the same light as other material. The way in which people encounter and manipulate it (e.g., in the microcosm of the vSTM setting) is to be understood with respect to processes that organize material into perceptual objects that may then be apprehended and manipulated by bodily effector systems. We outline how key empirical hallmarks of vSTM yield to this approach.