Question

Although the subject of some controversy, the Brown-Peterson task seemed to demonstrate that:

a) Short-term memory has an unlimited capacity.
b) Short-term memory can hold information for a brief duration.
c) Long-term memory is unaffected by interference.
d) Repetition enhances memory retention.

Answer 1

The Brown-Peterson task demonstrated that short-term memory can hold information for a brief duration.

Step-by-step explanation:

The Brown-Peterson task is an experiment that investigated short-term memory and the effects of memory trace decay and interference. The task involved participants recalling three-letter sequences called trigrams after different time intervals. The results showed that short-term memory can hold information for a brief duration, as participants remembered about 80% of the trigrams after a 3-second delay but only 10% after an 18-second delay. This suggests that short-term memory decays after a certain period of time.

This experiment does not demonstrate that short-term memory has an unlimited capacity (option a) or that long-term memory is unaffected by interference (option c). It also does not directly address the effect of repetition on memory retention (option d).