Dr. Baddeley describes how he got into the field of short-term memory research. His original contribution consisted of the finding that people found it difficult to remember short lists of similar sounding words in short-term memory (phonological confusion), but that this effect did not hold for long-term memory. For longer retention intervals the meaning of the words was much more important than their sounds. Starting out delineating the differences between short- and long-term storage of information, Dr. Baddeley went on to become one of the preeminent memory researchers of modern psychology.
