Traveling economically through memory space: Characterizing output order in memory for serial order

Lewandowsky, Stephan; Brown, Gordon D.; Thomas, Jacqueline

doi:10.3758/mc.37.2.181

Cited by 22 publications

(32 citation statements)

References 33 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…All the other tasks (except recognition, where just one item is involved) allow participants to decide which item to recall first and which items to recall subsequently. This consideration also applies to the running memory span task , notwithstanding the use of forward Other Tasks recalled early, thus taking advantage of their temporal recency (see Lewandowsky et al, 2009, for an extensive discussion). Thus it is adaptive-just in the sense of leading to better performance-for participants to give less weight to the temporal dimension during retrieval when recent items cannot be recalled early to take advantage of temporal/contextual overlap.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It remains unknown, however, whether TIEs would disappear in a free recall task when short list lengths are used, since it is known that free recall tends to occur in forward order under such conditions (Ward, Tan, & Grenfell-Essam, 2010). Lewandowsky et al (2009) suggested that forward serial recall can be seen as a ballistic process, in that once the first item has been produced, recall proceeds in an automatic fashion without the possibility of strategic intervention (e.g., to decide the order of recall). All the other tasks (except recognition, where just one item is involved) allow participants to decide which item to recall first and which items to recall subsequently.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Here, we additionally hypothesize that the greater reliance on a temporal dimension when recall order is unconstrained is adaptive (see also Lewandowsky, Brown, & Thomas, 2009), because, if recent items are recalled first, they are advantaged by their recency along the temporal dimension (cf. the telephone pole analogy).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Temporal isolation effects in recognition and serial recall

2010

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Temporal isolation effects in recognition and serial recall

2010

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

“…The experimenters did not control the temporal order in which participants wrote down their responses (Kane, personal communication, October 15, 2008). Therefore, it is possible that people deviated from recall in forward order, for instance by first writing the last item into the last slot, a common pattern in serial retrieval (Lewandowsky, Brown, & Thomas, 2009). The lack of control of output order is unfortunate because output order has a large influence on accuracy (Cowan, Saults, Elliott, & Moreno, 2002;Oberauer, 2003), and therefore any deviation from forward recall distorts the serial position curve.…”

Section: Serial Position Curvesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modeling working memory: a computational implementation of the Time-Based Resource-Sharing theory

2010

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Working memory is a core concept in cognition, predicting about 50% of the variance in IQ and reasoning tasks. A popular test of working memory is the complex span task, in which encoding of memoranda alternates with processing of distractors. A recent model of complex span performance, the Time-Based-Resource-Sharing (TBRS) model of Barrouillet and colleagues, has seemingly accounted for several crucial findings, in particular the intricate trade-off between deterioration and restoration of memory in the complex span task. According to the TBRS, memory traces decay during processing of the distractors, and they are restored by attentional refreshing during brief pauses in between processing steps. However, to date, the theory has been formulated only at a verbal level, which renders it difficult to test and to be certain of its intuited predictions. We present a computational instantiation of the TBRS and show that it can handle most of the findings on which the verbal model was based. We also show that there are potential challenges to the model that await future resolution. This instantiated model, TBRS*, is the first comprehensive computational model of performance in the complex span paradigm. The Matlab model code is available as a supplementary material of this article.

show abstract

“…The trade-off between item and order information can be implemented in SIMPLE by altering the attentional weights on the time and item dimensions as a function of experimental task (see also Lewandowsky, Brown, & Thomas, 2009;Lewandowsky, Nimmo, & Brown, 2008). Because the sum of the weights is constrained to be 1.0, if more attention is paid to the temporal dimension, less attention is paid to an item dimension, and vice versa.…”

Section: Explaining Backward Recallmentioning

confidence: 99%

Backward recall and benchmark effects of working memory

et al. 2010

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Four effects-the word length effect, the irrelevant speech effect, the acoustic confusion effect, and the concurrent articulation effect-have played a prominent role in the development of influential theories of immediate memory. Indeed, accounting for these four findings was one of the motivations for creating the phonological loop component of working memory (Baddeley, 1992), and these effects are seen as key data that computational models of short-term memory must account for (Lewandowsky & Farrell, 2008). Despite the numerous studies examining these phenomena, very few studies have examined them using backward recall. To that end, one purpose of the four experiments reported here was to assess whether the four benchmark effects of working memory are observable with backward recall. A second purpose was to test the predictions of two models of memory: Despite their many differences, both the primacy model (Page & Norris, 1998) and the feature model (Nairne, 1990) predict that all four effects should be observed with backward recall. Empirical ReviewWord length effect. The word length effect refers to the finding that lists of short (i.e., one-syllable) words are recalled better than otherwise comparable lists of longer (i.e., multisyllabic) words (Baddeley, Thomson, & Buchan an, 1975; for a review, see . The standard paradigm is forward immediate serial recall, but the word length effect is also observable with reconstruction of order (Nairne, Neath, & Serra, 1997), serial recognition (Baddeley, Chincotta, Stafford, & Turk, 2002), free recall (Watkins, 1972), single-item probe recall (Avons, Wright, & Pammer, 1994), and complex span (Tehan, Hendry, & Kocinski, 2001) tests. However, only a small number of studies have examined whether the effect is observable with backward recall.Cowan et al. (1992, Experiment 3) had subjects recall lists of short and long words in both a forward and a backward order, and recall direction was not known until test. However, a straightforward interpretation of the results is difficult, since word length was manipulated within a list (i.e., the first half of the list was short words, the second half long words), and since the lists had five items, there were not equal numbers of short and long items per list. Moreover, the stimuli used have since been shown to be atypical (see, e.g., Neath, Bireta, & Surprenant, 2003). Cowan, Wood, and Borne (1994) Working memory was designed to explain four benchmark memory effects: the word length effect, the irrelevant speech effect, the acoustic confusion effect, and the concurrent articulation effect. However, almost all research thus far has used tests that emphasize forward recall. In four experiments, we examine whether each effect is observable when the items are recalled in reverse order. Subjects did not know which recall direction would be required until the time of test, ensuring that encoding processes would be identical for both recall directions. Contrary to predictions of both the primacy model and the feature model, the benchm...

show abstract

Traveling economically through memory space: Characterizing output order in memory for serial order

Cited by 22 publications

References 33 publications

Temporal isolation effects in recognition and serial recall

Temporal isolation effects in recognition and serial recall

Modeling working memory: a computational implementation of the Time-Based Resource-Sharing theory

Backward recall and benchmark effects of working memory

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About