Immediate Memory and the “Perception” of Letter Sequences

Baddeley, Alan

doi:10.1080/17470216408416394

Cited by 80 publications

(51 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…items recalled, at no point does it substantially increase amount of information reproduced. This is consistent with the results of Pollack (1953) (2) 14.- Mean percen tage of letters recalled was then computed for each sequence and was correlated with acoustic confusability (Conrad & Hull, 1964) and predictability (Baddeley, 1964a) using the product-moment correlation. Results are shown in Table I.…”

supporting

confidence: 70%

“…Kintsch (1970, p.191) has subsequently concluded, on the basis of this one very limited study, that "Language f actors appear to be ineffective in short-term memory, or at least are overridden in importance by acoustic confusions." Such a conclusion is clearly at variance with the results of Baddeley (1964a , 1970). The following experiment, therefore, uses the teclmique that seems most likely to favor acoustic coding, sequential auditory presentation, and studies the relationship between acoustic confusability, predictability, and probability of recall of letter sequences of varying approximation to English.…”

contrasting

confidence: 55%

“…Kintsch (1970, p.191) has subsequently concluded, on the basis of this one very limited study, that "Language f actors appear to be ineffective in short-term memory, or at least are overridden in importance by acoustic confusions." Such a conclusion is clearly at variance with the results of Baddeley (1964a since Baddeley's study did not include measures of acoustic confusability. Furthermore, all the letters in each sequence were presented simultaneously.…”

contrasting

confidence: 54%

“…Predictability is a measure of the closeness with which a letter sequence approximates to the structure of English, and has been shown to correlate highly with probability of recalling approximations to English words (Baddeley, 1964a), and somewhat less highly with the recall of sequentially presented consonant sequences (Baddeley, Conrad, & Hull, 1965). A series of studies have shown a high correlation between probability of recalling a visually presented consonant sequence and its acoustic confusability, as measured by the probability of mishearing the constituent letters when presented in noise (Conrad, 1962;Conrad & Hull, 1964).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Language habits, acoustic confusability, and immediate memory for redundant letter sequences

Baddeley

1971

Psychon Sci

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Immediate memory was tested for sequences of 7, 8, 9, or 10 auditorily presented letters which comprised either words or zero-, first-, second-, or third-order approximations to English words. At all lengths, recall probability correlated highly with letter sequence predictability (.58-.78) but was unrelated to acoustic confusabilitv. It is suggested that coding was still phonemic but involved speech sounds comprising 'several letters rather than letter names.Short-term memory for letter sequences is influenced by two major variables, predictability and acoustic confusability. Predictability is a measure of the closeness with which a letter sequence approximates to the structure of English, and has been shown to correlate highly with probability of recalling approximations to English words (Baddeley, 1964a), and somewhat less highly with the recall of sequentially presented consonant sequences (Baddeley, Conrad, & Hull, 1965). A series of studies have shown a high correlation between probability of recalling a visually presented consonant sequence and its acoustic confusability, as measured by the probability of mishearing the constituent letters when presented in noise (Conrad, 1962;Conrad & Hull, 1964). A later study by Conrad, Freeman, & Hull (1965) directly compared the contributions of predictability and acoustic confusability to the recall of sequences of six random consonants and concluded that the main determinant of recall probability in this situation was acoustic confusability, with predictability playing a relatively minor role. Kintsch (1970, p.191) has subsequently concluded, on the basis of this one very limited study, that "Language f actors appear to be ineffective in short-term memory, or at least are overridden in importance by acoustic confusions." Such a conclusion is clearly at variance with the results of Baddeley (1964a , 1970). The following experiment, therefore, uses the teclmique that seems most likely to favor acoustic coding, sequential auditory presentation, and studies the relationship between acoustic confusability, predictability, and probability of recall of letter sequences of varying approximation to English. MATERIAL The technique described by Miller, Bruner, & Postman (1954) was used to generate eight sequences of 7, 8,9, and 10 letters of zero-, first-, second-, and third-order approximation to English. These were based on the tables of letter frequency in written English compiled by Baddeley, Conrad, & Thomson (1960). In addition, four sets of eight words (one set each of length 7,8,9, and 10 letters) were selected at random from the Thorndike-Lorge list, making a total of 40 sequences of each length. PROCEDURE A separate group of 20 enlisted men was tested at each of the four sequence lengths. Letters were read out at a rate of one per second, and Ss were allowed 2 sec per letter to recall as much of the sequence as possible. Ss were instructed to write each letter in the appropriate serial pOSition on a prepared answer sheet. They were familiarized with the material t...

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supporting

confidence: 70%

contrasting

confidence: 55%

“…Kintsch (1970, p.191) has subsequently concluded, on the basis of this one very limited study, that "Language f actors appear to be ineffective in short-term memory, or at least are overridden in importance by acoustic confusions." Such a conclusion is clearly at variance with the results of Baddeley (1964a since Baddeley's study did not include measures of acoustic confusability. Furthermore, all the letters in each sequence were presented simultaneously.…”

contrasting

confidence: 54%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Language habits, acoustic confusability, and immediate memory for redundant letter sequences

Baddeley

1971

Psychon Sci

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“…As pointed out by Krueger (1975), it may be "that familiarity can affect either memory or perception, depending on which is more critical to overall task performance" (p. 954). In fact, memory effects in letter identification have been convincingly demonstrated (Baddeley, 1964). Furthermore, logically it is necessary that any effects of familiarity on perception involve access to some sort of memory representation.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Perceptual versus postperceptual mediation of visual context effects: Evidence from the letter-superiority effect

Reingold

Jolicœur

1993

Perception & Psychophysics

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Two experiments demonstrated letter-context effects that cannot easily be accounted for by postperceptual theories based on structural redundancy, figural goodness, or memory advantage. In Experiment 1, subjects identified the color of a letter fragment more accurately in letter than in nonletter contexts. In Experiment 2, subjects identified the feature presented in a precued color more accurately in letters than in nonlettcrs. We argue that these effects result from topdown perceptual processing.Briefly presented line segments are identified more accurately when they are embedded in coherent object-like contexts than when they are either embedded in noncoherent contexts or presented alone. These visual-context effects are referred to as the object-superiority effect (OSE) and the object-line effect (OLE), respectively. The original demonstrations of the OSE (Weisstein & Harris, 1974) and the OLE (Williams & Weisstein, 1978) were aimed at drawing an "analogy between object and word perception, and opening further opportunities for studying the effects of contexts on the perception of constituent elements without being restricted to linguistic material" (Williams & Weisstein, 1978, p. 85). Similarly, the welldocumented context effects in word perception inspired the exploration of a variety of visual-context effects with stimuli such as faces (e.g., Gyoba, Arimura, & Maruyama, 1980;Homa, Haver, & Schwartz, 1976;Purcell & Stewart, 1986van Santen & Jonides, 1978), letters (Schendel & Shaw, 1976), and real-world scenes (Biederman, 1972(Biederman, , 1981Biederman, Glass, & Stacey, 1973;Palmer, 1975). This research was supported by NSERC Grant A2579 to P. J. and NSERC Grant 001'0105451 to E. M. R. We are indebted to Liz Bosman, Phil Merikle, and Derek Besner for many constructive discussions of the issues, to Keith McGowan for writing the software, and to Susan Fraser for assisting in data collection. We would especially like to acknowledge Lester Krueger's helpful input during the process of revising earlier drafts of this paper. We also thank James Enns and two anonymous reviewers for their contributions. Correspondence should be addressed to either E. M. Reingold, Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Erindale College, 3359 Mississauga Road, Mississauga, Ontario, Canada L5L lC6 (e-mail: reingold@psych.toronto.edu); after July 1993: School of Psychology, The University of New South Wales, P.O. Box I, Kensington, New South Wales, 2033, Australia; or P. Jolicoeur, Department of Psychology, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3GI.Despite the intriguing surface similarities between the various visual-context effects, it may be premature to conclude that these effects are, in fact, comparable. For example, Weisstein and her colleagues (e.g., Weisstein & Harris, 1974;Williams & Weisstein, 1978) viewed the OSE and the OLE as analogous to the word-superiority effect (WSE) and the word-letter effect (WLE), respectively (for reviews of the WSE literature, see Baron, 1978;Johnston, 1981;Krueger, 1...

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