Local temporal distinctiveness does not benefit auditory verbal and spatial serial recall (original) (raw)
Related papers
Memory & Cognition, 2006
The notion of a link between time and memory is intuitively appealing and forms the core assumption of temporal distinctiveness models. Distinctiveness models predict that items that are temporally isolated from their neighbors at presentation should be recalled better than items that are temporally crowded. By contrast, event-based theories consider time to be incidental to the processes that govern memory, and such theories would not imply a temporal isolation advantage unless participants engaged in a consolidation process (e.g., rehearsal or selective encoding) that exploited the temporal structure of the list. In this report, we examine two studies that assessed the effect of temporal distinctiveness on memory, using auditory (Experiment 1) and auditory and visual (Experiment 2) presentation with unpredictably varying interitem intervals. The results show that with unpredictable intervals temporal isolation does not benefit memory, regardless of presentation modality.
Temporal isolation effects in recognition and serial recall
Memory & Cognition, 2010
Recent temporal distinctiveness models of memory predict that temporally isolated items will be recalled better than temporally crowded items. The effect has been found in some tasks (free recall; memory for serial order when report order is unconstrained; running memory span) but not in others (forward serial recall). Such results suggest that the attentional weighting given to a temporal dimension in memory may vary with task demands. Here we find robust temporal isolation effects in recognition memory (Experiment 1) and a smaller isolation effect in forward serial recall when an open pool of items is used (Experiment 2). Analysis of 26 temporal isolation effects suggests that the phenomenon occurs in a range of tasks but is larger when it is useful to attend to a temporal dimension in memory. The overall pattern of results is taken to favor memory models that rely on multiple weighted dimensions in memory, one of which is temporal.
Journal of Memory and Language, 2006
According to temporal distinctiveness models, items that are temporally isolated from their neighbors during list presentation are more distinct and thus should be recalled better. Event-based theories, by contrast, deny that time plays a role at encoding and predict no beneficial effect of temporal isolation, although they acknowledge that a pause after item presentation may afford extra opportunity for a consolidation process such as rehearsal or grouping. We report two experiments aimed at differentiating between the two classes of theories. The results show that neither serial recall nor probed recall benefit from temporal isolation, unless participants use pauses to group a list. Simulations of the SIMPLE model provide convergent evidence that short-term memory for serial order need not involve temporal representations.
Temporal isolation does not facilitate forward serial recall--or does it?
Memory & Cognition, 2008
In numerous recent studies in short-term memory, it has been established that forward serial recall is unaffected by the temporal isolation of to-be-remembered items. These findings contradict the temporal distinctiveness view of memory, which expects items that are temporally isolated from their neighbors to be more distinct and hence remembered better. To date, isolation effects have only been found with tests that do not constrain output order, such as free recall. This article reports two experiments that, for the first time, report a temporal isolation effect with forward serial recall, using a running memory task in which the end of the list is unpredictable. The results suggest that people are able to encode and use temporal information in situations in which positional information is of little value. We conclude that the overall pattern of findings concerning temporal isolation supports models of short-term memory that postulate multidimensional representations of items.
Serial recall and presentation schedule: A micro‐analysis of local distinctiveness
Memory, 2003
According to temporal distinctiveness theories, items that are temporally isolated from their neighbours during presentation are more distinct and thus are recalled better. Event-based theories, which deny that elapsed time plays a role at encoding, explain isolation effects by assuming that temporal isolation provides extra time for rehearsal or consolidation of encoding. The two classes of theories can be differentiated by examining the symmetry of isolation effects: Event-based accounts predict that performance should be affected only by pauses following item presentation (because they allow time for rehearsal or consolidation), whereas distinctiveness predicts that items should also benefit from preceding pauses. The first experiment manipulated inter-item intervals and showed an effect of intervals following but not preceding presentation, in line with event-based accounts. The second experiment showed that the effect of following interval was abolished by articulatory suppression. The data are consistent with event-based theories but can be handled by time-based distinctiveness models if they allow for additional encoding during inter-item pauses. MEMORY, 2005, 13 (3/4), 283±292
Perceptual-motor determinants of auditory-verbal serial short-term memory
Journal of Memory and Language, 2016
The role of the compatibility between obligatory perceptual organization and the active assembly of a motor-plan in auditory-verbal serial recall was examined. The classic finding that serial recall is poorer with ear-alternating items was shown to be related to spatialsource localization, thereby confirming a basic tenet of the perceptual-motor account and disconfirming an early account characterizing the two ears as separate inputchannels (Experiment 1). Promoting the streaming-by-location of ear-alternating itemsand therefore the incompatibility between perceived and actual order-augmented the ear-alternation effect (Experiment 2) whereas demoting streaming-by-location by reducing the regularity of the alternation attenuated it (Experiment 3). Finally, increasing the perceptual variability of an ear-alternating list while demoting the likelihood of streaming-by-location-by adding uncorrelated voice changes-also reduced the earalternation effect as did articulatory suppression for that part of the list (pre-recency) associated with motor-planning (Experiment 4). The results are incompatible with theories in which perceptual variability impairs serial recall due to a deficit in encoding items into a limited-capacity short-term memory space and instead point to a central role for perceptual and motor processes in serial short-term memory performance.
Transitional Information in Spatial Serial Memory: Path Characteristics Affect Recall Performance
Journal of Experimental …, 2005
This study examined the role of stimulus characteristics in a visuospatial order reconstruction task in which participants were required to recall the order of sequences of spatial locations. The complexity of the to-be-remembered sequences, as measured by path crossing, path length, and angles, was found to affect serial memory, in terms of both recall accuracy and response times. The results demonstrate that not all sequences are remembered equally and that spatial characteristics of the sequences constitute an important variable in the understanding of visuospatial serial memory. More important, the data suggest that spatial path represents transitional information and that, as is the case in verbal serial memory, transitional information is of critical importance in serial memory.
Functional equivalence of verbal and spatial information in serial short-term memory
Journal of Experimental Psychology-learning Memory and Cognition, 1995
Performance on a test of serial memory for the spatial position of a sequence of dots showed similarities to typical results from the serial recall of verbal material: a marked increase in error with increasing list length, a modest rise in error as retention interval increased, and bow-shaped serial position curves. This task was susceptible to interference from both a spatial task (rote tapping) and a verbal task (mouthed articulatory suppression) and also from the presence of irrelevant speech. Effects were comparable to those found with a serial verbal task that was generally similar in demand characteristics to the spatial task. As a generalization, disruption of the serial recall of visuospatial material was more marked if the interference conditions involved a changing sequence of actions or materials, but not if a single event (tap, mouthed utterance, or sound) was repeated.
Distinctiveness in serial memory for spatial information
Memory & Cognition, 2010
Several studies have shown that recall performance depends on the extent to which an item differs from other items in a sequence (the distinctiveness effect; see, e.g., Kelley & Nairne, 2001). Distinctiveness effects, however, have been demonstrated mainly in the verbal domain. The present study extends distinctiveness effects to the spatial domain. In two experiments, participants recalled the order in which series of spatially located dots had been presented. Item discriminability was varied within the sequence by manipulating the duration of the interval inserted between the presentation of the dots (Experiment 1) and the perceptual characteristics of the stimuli (Experiment 2). The results showed that these manipulations in the spatial domain produce distinctiveness effects similar to those observed with verbal material (see, e.g., Neath & Crowder, 1990) and suggest that distinctiveness models of memory should take into account the processing of spatial information.
When temporal isolation benefits memory for serial order
Journal of Memory and Language, 2008
According to temporal distinctiveness models, items that are temporally isolated from their neighbors during list pre-10 sentation are more distinct and thus should be recalled better. Contrary to that expectation of distinctiveness views, 11 much recent evidence has shown that forward short-term serial recall is unaffected by temporal order tasks that con-12 firmed that when report order is strictly forward, temporal isolation does not benefit performance. However, both 13 experiments also showed that when report order is unconstrained, temporal isolation does benefit performance. The 14 differences between forward and unconstrained report were found to be independent of whether or not people can antic-15 ipate the type of test at encoding. The presence and absence of isolation effects under two different conditions, both 16 requiring memory for order, challenges many existing theories of memory but is compatible with the idea that multiple 17 differentially weighted types of information contribute to memory retrieval. 18