In the single-store model of memory, the enhanced recall for the last items in a free-recall task (i.e., the recency effect) is understood to reflect a general property of memory rather than a separate short-term store. This interpretation is supported by the finding of a long-term recency effect under conditions that eliminate the contribution from the short-term store. In this article, evidence is reviewed showing that recency effects in the short and long terms have different properties, and it is suggested that 2 memory components are needed to account for the recency effects: an episodic contextual system with changing context and an activation-based short-term memory buffer that drives the encoding of item-context associations. A neurocomputational model based on these 2 components is shown to account for previously observed dissociations and to make novel predictions, which are confirmed in a set of experiments.

The effect of endogenous attention on the detectability of weak flavorants was examined in an absolute detection (two-alternative forced-choice) task. Attention to sucrose improved the detectability of sucrose, a gustation-based flavorant, both when the alternative was water and when it was vanillin. But attention to vanillin did not improve the detectability of vanillin, an olfaction-based flavorant, either when the alternative was water or when it was sucrose. Nor did attention improve the detectability of vanillin when the alternative was citric acid, a tastant that is qualitatively less similar to vanillin than is sucrose. Attention had no positive effect on the detection of either sucrose or vanillin when it was mixed with the other substance. These findings suggest that although it is possible to attend selectively to gustatory flavors, it may be more difficult to attend selectively to olfactory flavors-perhaps because attention to flavors, which are taken in the mouth, is directed spatially toward the tongue, where gustatory, but not olfactory, receptors are located.

We describe a new, open flow device for presenting taste stimuli to human subjects under controlled conditions of timing. The device delivers each stimulus as a mist to the participant's tongue through one of 16 nozzles attached to a linear slide. Software controls the position of the slide, the duration of the stimulus, and the duration of the pre-and poststimulus water rinses and records the responses of the participant. Temporal characteristicsof this system make it especially applicable to studies on the role of attention in taste perception.