The distinction between short-term and long-term memory is of fundamental importance in psychology and it formed the cornerstone of the famous multi-store model put forward by Atkinson and Shiffrin (1968). However, the basic idea goes back much further than that.
The Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud argued that memory resembles a ‘mystic writing pad’ consisting of a celluloid sheet (short-term memory) on top of a hard slab (long-term memory). Writing on the celluloid leaves a clear record on the celluloid and a faint one on the slab underneath. If you pull off the celluloid sheet, the record vanishes (i.e. the imprint left by the short-term memory), leaving only the one on the slab below this, which is the long-term memory.
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