Serial recall of colors: Two models of memory for serial order applied to continuous visual stimuli

Abstract

This study investigated the effects of serial position and temporal distinctiveness on serial recall of simple visual stimuli. Participants observed lists of five colors presented at varying, unpredictably ordered interitem intervals, and their task was to reproduce the colors in their order of presentation by selecting colors on a continuous-response scale. To control for the possibility of verbal labeling, articulatory suppression was required in one of two experimental sessions. The predictions were derived through simulation from two computational models of serial recall: SIMPLE represents the class of temporal-distinctiveness models, whereas SOB-CS represents event-based models. According to temporal-distinctiveness models, items that are temporally isolated within a list are recalled more accurately than items that are temporally crowded. In contrast, event-based models assume that the time intervals between items do not affect recall performance per se, although free time following an item can improve memory for that item because of extended time for the encoding. The experimental and the simulated data were fit to an interference measurement model to measure the tendency to confuse items with other items nearby on the list-the locality constraint-in people as well as in the models. The continuous-reproduction performance showed a pronounced primacy effect with no recency, as well as some evidence for transpositions obeying the locality constraint. Though not entirely conclusive, this evidence favors event-based models over a role for temporal distinctiveness. There was also a strong detrimental effect of articulatory suppression, suggesting that verbal codes can be used to support serial-order memory of simple visual stimuli.

Anticipating words during spoken discourse comprehension: A large-scale, pre-registered replication study using brain potentials

“…We added these fillers to counter the argument that participants will adapt to unexpected syntactic information (i.e., start expecting unexpected information) and therefore not show prediction-consistency effects. Such adaptation-effects have been reported, albeit only for frequent repetition of an unexpected syntactic structure (see Fine, Jaeger, Farmer, & Qian, 2013 ; but see also a recent failure to replicate this type of adaptation effect, Stack, James & Watson, 2018 ), not for varied sentences structures as used in the current experiment. We have also added 60 relatively non-constraining stories to increase the variability of our materials and to make the ratio between the experimental and filler stories more similar to that of VB05.…”

What is time good for in working memory?

“…Whereas the predicted effects have been observed in recognition tests (Morin et al, 2010) and some versions of reconstruction-of-order tests, they are conspicuously absent in immediate serial-recall tests (Lewandowsky et al, 2006;Nimmo & Lewandowsky, 2005Parmentier et al, 2006;Peteranderl & Oberauer, 2018).…”

Frequency effects on memory: A resource-limited theory.

“…One prediction that could be challenged by existing data is that because resources recover over time, increasing the temporal gap before a study item should increase memory for that item. Most serial recall studies have not found evidence for this prediction (Brown & Lewandowsky, 2005;Lewandowsky, Brown, Wright, & Nimmo, 2006;Peteranderl & Oberauer, 2018). Nevertheless, such temporal isolation effects do occur in free recall tasks (Brown, Morin, & Lewandowsky, 2006), probed recognition tasks (Morin, Brown, & Lewandowsky, 2010), running memory span tasks (Geiger & Lewandowsky, 2008), unconstrained order reconstruction tasks (Lewandowsky, Nimmo, & Brown, 2008), and in one case, even in a forward serial recall task (Morin, Brown, & Lewandowsky, 2010) 24 .…”