A model of memory retrieval is described. The model embodies 4 main claims: (a) temporal memory--traces of items are represented in memory partly in terms of their temporal distance from the present; (b) scale-similarity--similar mechanisms govern retrieval from memory over many different timescales; (c) local distinctiveness--performance on a range of memory tasks is determined by interference from near psychological neighbors; and (d) interference-based forgetting--all memory loss is due to interference and not trace decay. The model is applied to data on free recall and serial recall. The account emphasizes qualitative similarity in the retrieval principles involved in memory performance at all timescales, contrary to models that emphasize distinctions between short-term and long-term memory.

The feature model (Nairne, 1990) is extended to account for the effects of irrelevant speech and concomitant interactions in immediate serial recall. In the feature model, both articulatory suppression and irrelevant speech are seen as adding noise to the memory representation, the difference being that articulatory suppression diverts more resources than does irrelevant speech. The addition of noise impairs recall because it reduces the probability of successful redintegration. When a competitor is incorrectly recalled, rather than the correct item, this competitor is recalled out of order, producing an increase in order errors. Six simulations are reported that show that the model accounts for (1) the impairment by both irrelevant speech and articulatory suppression, (2) the irrelevance of the phonological and semantic composition of the irrelevant speech, (3) greater disruption when the irrelevant speech tokens vary, (4) the abolition of the phonological similarity effect for visual, but not for auditory, items, (5) the abolition of the word length effect for both visual and auditory items, and (6) the abolition of the irrelevant speech effect under articulatory suppression for both visual and auditory items. The feature model is compared with the two other major views of irrelevant speech, the phonological store hypothesis and the changing state hypothesis.

Digitized photographs of snowflakes were presented for a recognition test after retention intervals of varying durations. While overall accuracy and discrimination remained constant, as the retention interval increased, primacy increased from chance to reliably better than chance while recency decreased to chance levels. A variation of Murdock's (1960) distinctiveness model accounted for the changing primacy and recency effects observed in both between-and within-subjects designs. The generality of the model was examined in two different paradigms: lexical access during sentence processing, and free recall in the continual distractor paradigm. In both cases, the model made accurate qualitative predictions for both latency and accuracy measures.Recently, there has been a flurry of articles concerned with the idea that recollection of an item, in a variety of different tasks and paradigms, depends critically on its distinctiveness-that is, on the degree to which a given item stands out among the other items in the set (e.g., Crowder & Neath, 1991; Gardiner & Hampton, 1988;Glenberg & Swanson, 1986; Johnson, 1991;McDaniel & Einstein, 1986;Neath & Crowder, 1990;Schmidt, 1991). The idea, of course, is not new: first formulated verbally by Koffka (1935), and then quantitatively by Murdock (1960), the central idea can be traced back to Aristotle (Burnham, 1888). In this paper, I demonstrate that a variation of Murdock's model of distinctiveness can account for serial position effects observed in recognition memory and that this model can be applied to other paradigms as well.Murdock (1960) defined distinctiveness as the extent to which a given stimulus "stands out" (p. 17) from other stimuli and noted that "the concept of distinctiveness refers to the relationship between a given stimulus and one or more comparison stimuli, and if there are no comparison stimuli the concept of distinctiveness is simply not applicable" (p. 21). By means of an analogy with visual perception, one can demonstrate that just as the insertion of space between items in the visual field should make them more distinctive spatially, the addition of an interval between items in a list will make them more distinctive temporally (Glenberg & Swanson, 1986;Neath & Crowder, 1990). An item can also be made more disSome of these results were presented at the 33rd annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society, St. Louis, November 1992. I wish to thank Vincent Biedron, Michelle Hrabovsky, and Victoria Smejkal for running the subjects in Experiment I, and Kimberly Croley for running the subjects in Experiment 2. In addition, I thank Robert G. Crowder and Aimee M. Surprenant for helpful and insightful discussions. Correspondence concerning this article may be addressed to 1. Neath, 1364 Psychological Sciences Building, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47907-1364 (e-mail: neath@brazil.psych.purdue.edu).tinct by the manipulation of physical properties (Calkins, 1894;von Restorff, 1933), or, presumably, of any other dimension of interest. This view of distincti...

Memory is worse for items that take longer to pronounce, even when the items are equated for frequency, number of syllables, and number of phonemes. Current explanations of the word-length effect rely on a time-based decay process within the articulatory loop structure in working memory. Using an extension of Nairne's (1990) feature model, we demonstrate that the approximately linear relationship between span and pronunciation rate can be observed in a model that does not use the concept of decay. Moreover, the feature model also correctly predicts the effects of modality, phonological similarity, articulatory suppression, and serial position on memory for items of different lengths. We argue that word-length effects do not offer sufficient justification for including time-based decay components in theories of memory.

Recency, in remembering a series of events, reflects the simple fact that memory is vivid for what has just happened but deteriorates over time. Theories based on distinctiveness, an alternative to the multistore model, assert that the last few events in a series are well remembered because their times of occurrence are more highly distinctive than those of earlier items. Three experiments examined the role of temporal and ordinal factors in auditorily and visually presented lists that were temporally organized by distractor materials interpolated between memory items. With uniform distractor periods, the results were consistent with Glenberg's (1987) temporal distinctiveness theory. When the procedure was altered so that distractor periods became progressively shorter from the beginning to the end of the list, the results were consistent for only the visual modality; the auditory modality produced a different and unpredicted (by the theory) pattern of results, thus falsifying the claim that the auditory modality derives more benefit from temporal information than the visual modality. We distinguish serial order information from specifically temporal information, arguing that the former may be enhanced by auditory presentation but that the two modalities are more nearly equal with respect to the latter.