What does the Brown-Peterson task primarily assess?

The Brown-Peterson task primarily assesses the limits of short-term memory. This task involves presenting participants with a list of items, such as consonant trigrams, which they are then asked to remember. Following the presentation, participants engage in a distracting task, like counting backward by threes, that prevents them from rehearsing the items. After a specific period, they are asked to recall the original items.

The core purpose of this task is to investigate how quickly information can be forgotten when rehearsal is interrupted, thereby shedding light on the capacity and duration of short-term memory. Results from the Brown-Peterson task demonstrate that without rehearsal, items held in short-term memory tend to decay rapidly, highlighting the transient nature and limitations of this memory system.