The focus of attention is similar to other memory systems rather than uniquely different

The focus of attention is similar to other memory systems rather than uniquely different

When short-term memory was created in late 1950s/early 1960s, it ushered in a view in which memory is divided into multiple memory systems, each of which has different properties, each of which operates according to different rules and principles, and each of which is responsible for storing different types of information and supporting memory in different types of situations. This quickly became the dominant view of the field. An opposing view emphasizes processing rather systems, and suggests that memory performance is dependent on the relation between the processing done at encoding and the processing done at retrieval rather than on which store holds the information. The debate over systems versus processes was perhaps most prominent at the turn of the century (see, for example, the volume edited by Foster & Jelicic, 1999) but it is fair to say that the debate is still ongoing (see Surprenant & Neath, 2009).

One commonality among these two approaches is that they emphasize differences (either in store or in processing): Differences in memory performance are taken as indicating a different underlying memory system or different process. Memory, whether seen as a system or process, is chopped up, divided, subdivided, and partitioned into ever decreasing portions.

An alternate view emphasizes similarities rather than differences by advocating the search for general principles of memory (Surprenant & Neath, 2009). In contrast to both the systems and processes view, this functional approach focuses on larger and larger portions of the memory puzzle. It is this view that provided the impetus for the current paper, and while our question is narrow, its implications are broad and the answer relevant to theorists of any persuasion: Is the focus of attention, unlike all other proposed memory systems, immune to proactive interference?