RETRIEVAL PROCESS IN FREE RECALL CREATES ERRORS IN SHORT TERM MEMORY BUT NOT IN LONG TERM MEMORY Eugen Tarnow Avalon Business Systems 19-03 Maple Avenue, Fair Lawn, NJ 07410, USA An analysis of free recall errors shows that the free recall retrieval process in short term memory is accompanied by a linear rise in errors, without discontinuities, invalidating short term memory models in which stores or states are sequentially emptied. <...> This leads to a “Heisenberg uncertainty principle” situation: the more items recalled, the less accurate is the recall of those items. <...> The error probability does not reach a plateau, is independent of time passing without a retrieval process being engaged, suggesting that the retrieval process itself introduces errors in short term memory. <...> In contrast, in long term memory the error probability remains constant, indicative of a single store without retrieval induced errors. <...> Error terminated short term memory free recall distributions are the same as distributions terminated by correct items. <...> Items in a list are displayed or read to subjects who are then asked to retrieve the items. <...> In the present contribution I will focus on the opposite: analyzing errors that subjects make when they retrieve items that were not in the list. <...> If there was just one store, there would be just one error probability for each item (Fig. 1, upper left panel; the scales in the figure are arbitrary). <...> Multi-store models would predict different error probabilities for each store. <...> If a working memory store is emptied first during the recall, then there should be a discontinuity in the number of errors when the next short term memory store is emptied (Fig 1, upper right panel). <...> If the size of working memory varies somewhat between subjects, or some items are chunked by some subjects but not by others, the discontinuity should become rounded out (Fig. 1, lower left panel). <...> Thus the hypothesis of this article will be that the probability of errors should show a discontinuity or a rounded discontinuity as a function of the number of items recalled. <...> If, on the other hand, there is significant coupling between the memory stores, in which <...>