Intelligence and short-term memory: A clandestine relationship

Five possible mechanisms are considered as being responsible for the systematic variation of serial STM with IQ, namely rehearsal maintenance, chunking, access, encoding of item and/or order information, and trace persistence. A STM/IQ correlational study is reported. It was concluded from analysis of a correlation matrix, and from earlier reported data, that the encoding of items-in-order into an already loaded store appears to be the critical mechanism in determining IQ-related individual differences in STM performance, at least in children. The implications of individual difference data for models of STM are also discussed.