Does articulatory rehearsal help immediate serial recall?

Abstract

Articulatory rehearsal is assumed to benefit verbal working memory. Yet, there is no experimental evidence supporting a causal link between rehearsal and serial-order memory, which is one of the hallmarks of working memory functioning. Across four experiments, we tested the hypothesis that rehearsal improves working memory by asking participants to rehearse overtly and by instructing different rehearsal schedules. In Experiments 1a, 1b, and 2, we compared an instructed cumulative-rehearsal condition against a free-rehearsal condition. The instruction increased the prevalence of cumulative rehearsal, but recall performance remained unchanged or decreased compared to the free-rehearsal baseline. Experiment 2 also tested the impact of a fixed rehearsal instruction; this condition yielded substantial performance costs compared to the baseline. Experiment 3 tested whether rehearsals (according to an experimenter-controlled protocol) are beneficial compared to a matched articulatory suppression condition that blocked rehearsals of the memoranda. Again, rehearsing the memoranda yielded no benefit compared to articulatory suppression. In sum, our results are incompatible with the notion that rehearsal is beneficial to working memory.

Comparing different instructed‐refreshing schedules: evidence for cumulative, forward‐order refreshing of verbal lists?

“…According to the second possibility, we did not observe verbal serial recall performance to be drastically affected by changing the starting point or by changing the order of refreshing because participants did not follow our refreshing instructions, even though we aimed at creating conditions that strongly encouraged participants to follow our instructions. It is worth mentioning that Souza and Oberauer recently used a similar approach to examine the effects of cumulative, forward‐order verbal rehearsal on verbal serial recall. Although they had an independent way of assessing the extent to which participants were following their instructions, by asking participants to rehearse out loud, we could not ask our participants to “think out loud,” without inducing the use of verbal strategies (even though requiring overt recall of the refreshed items would provide a means to ensure that participants were indeed paying attention to the to‐be‐refreshed memory items).…”

No Evidence That Articulatory Rehearsal Improves Complex Span Performance

“…Performance in the rehearsal and suppression conditions did not differ, indicating that the correlation between rehearsal and recall observed under the free rehearsal conditions does not reflect a causal effect of rehearsal on recall. Altogether, the findings of Souza and Oberauer (2018) place low plausibility on the assumption that rehearsal is beneficial to WM performance.…”

“…In a third experiment, Souza and Oberauer (2018) tested whether the natural occurrence of rehearsals in the free-rehearsal baseline already reflects the best performance one can achieve through rehearsal by comparing it to an articulatory suppression condition. In this new experiment, participants were presented the free-rehearsals performed by a participant in one of the previous experiments.…”

Does rehearsal matter? Left anterior temporal alpha and theta band changes correlate with the beneficial effects of rehearsal on working memory

“…Visual stimuli may also benefit from rehearsal when the stimulus is recoded into a verbal representation [4][5][6] . However, the benefit of labeling and rehearsal may depend on the working memory task [7][8][9] .…”

“…The frequency band differences by band were calculated by averaging the absolute amplitude within a given frequency band across the entire delay period (0-6000 msec) for rehearsal and subtracting the corresponding value for the suppression condition. The frequency (f) ranges under consideration were 4 to 30 Hz: theta (4-8 Hz), alpha(8)(9)(10)(11)(12)(13), and lower and upper beta (13-20 and 20-30 Hz, respectively).EEG Statistical AnalysisScalp-level TFA and source-level TFA were compared using paired-samples ttests with corrections for multiple comparisons using non-parametric cluster permutation testing (N = 1,000 permutations)71 in BESA Statistics v2.0. Correlations were run between TFA and performance with corrections for multiple comparisons.…”