Does semantic similarity affect immediate memory for order? Usually not, but sometimes it does.
Benjamin Kowialiewski,
Steve Majerus,
Klaus Oberauer
Abstract:Recall performance in working memory (WM) is strongly affected by the similarity between items. When asked to encode and recall list of items in their serial order, people confuse more often the position of similar compared to dissimilar items. Models of WM explain this deleterious effect of similarity through a problem of discriminability between WM representations. In contrast, when lists of items that are all semantically similar are compared to lists of dissimilar items, semantic similarity does not negati… Show more
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