Scale-invariant and locally distinctive memory: the SIMPLE approach

A long-standing controversy in cognitive psychology concerns the need to assume short- and long-term memory stores. A new formal model of scale-invariant memory and perceptual identification, SIMPLE, accounts for a wide range of data over short and long time scales using the same basic retrieval principles. SIMPLE assumes a single store in which the distinctiveness of each memory item is calculated relative to other items presented across the same scale.