I am also interested in how information is held and subsequently accessed and retrieved from short-term memory. Recent work suggests that the recognition of items in short-term memory might be based on a familiarity signal based on memory strenghts and the similarity between items in memory and a probe test item (our paper). In follow up work, we have shown that the strength of memories for letters and words decreases as a power function (our paper), and that there may be no need to posit separate short- and long-term memory stores for verbal memory.
