Temporal coding in verbal information processing.

Abstract

Two experiments were conducted with a directed-forgetting paradigm to evaluate the degree of temporal information carried by the to-be-remembered (TBR) and the to-be-forgotten (TBF) items. The first experiment employed a serial position judgment task, and the second employed a pairwise comparison task under either primacy-or recency-judgment instructions. Both experiments showed that little temporal information was evidenced in the TBF items, whereas temporal'coding seemed to be "automatic" for the TBR items. Based upon these observations, a contextual association theory of temporal coding was proposed, which assumes "study-phase retrieval" as the basic mechanism for coding temporal relationships between items. Predictions generated from this theory were contrasted with those derived from a strength theory of recency judgment. Results from a critical experiment support contextual association theory and discredit strength theory.The ability of human subjects to detect the temporal relations among input events plays a very important role in the processing of information. In fact, almost every experiment in verbal learning and memory requires the presentation of a series of events distributed over some temporal interval. Research on encoding operations of human information processing indicates that coding of the to-be-remembered items always includes information about this "temporal" date of the occurrence of an item (e.g.

Positional information in short-term memory: Relative or absolute?

“…Moreover, there is some evidence against this rehearsal hypothesis. For example, several studies have demonstrated that people extract positional information even under incidental learning (e.g., Hintzman, Block, & Summers, 1973;Nairne, 1992;Toglia & Kimble, 1976), although perhaps not as well as under intentionallearning (Tzeng, Lee, & Wetzel, 1979). Also, in a condition in which participants rehearsed lists overtly during the retention interval, Estes (1991) showed that the majority of items that did not occur in the rehearsal protocol could still occur at or near the correct position in recall.…”

Scale effects in memory for the timeof events

“…Age of the trace probably provides useful time information for shorter delays than those tested here. A number of the verballeaming studies show "recency effects" for accuracy of time judgments when recall is within a few minutes of the end of the list (e.g., Hintzman et al, 1973;Tzeng, 1976), but these effects are typically absent for longer delays (e.g., Hintzman et aI., 1973;Tzeng et al, 1979). The apparent paradox that more recent events are more accurately dated in the long-term memory studies, including this one, could be attributed to forgetting contextual associates of the events from which time of occurrence can be inferred.…”

Dissociative effects of orthographic distinctiveness in pure and mixed lists: an item-order account

“…First, free recall performance depends jointly on encoding information about the individual items in the list (termed item-specific processing) and information about the relations among the list items (termed relational processing; Einstein & Hunt, 1980;Hunt & McDaniel, 1993;Mandler, 1969). Second, for lists of unrelated items (such as those used in the orthographic distinctiveness literature), the primary relational information available is the serial order in which the list items are presented (e.g., Toglia & Kimble, 1976;Tzeng, Lee, & Wetzel, 1979), and such information is relied upon to guide free recall (Burns, 1996;Postman, 1972).…”