Visual Hebb repetition effects survive changes to both output order and concurrent articulation

Abstract

Building upon the work of Guerrette et al. (2017), we examine the effect of output order on the visual Hebb repetition effect. We limit the opportunities for forward recall at test by using a novel positional recall procedure, employing non-verbal visual stimuli, and requiring participants to undertake concurrent articulation (CA). During the encoding phase, participants received sequences of six unfamiliar-faces. For every third sequence, participants received the same faces in the same serial order (i.e. the Hebb sequence). For the remaining trials, the sequence items were presented in a random order (i.e. the filler sequences). At test, participants were required to either select the faces in their order of original presentation (SR) or recall the serial position of each individually represented face tested in a randomised order (PR). For both recall conditions, the Hebb repetition effect was evident, and this persisted with CA. The findings demonstrate that the Hebb repetition effect is not dependent upon forward recall and is consistent with the view that the effect is underpinned by perceptual processing rather than repeated retrieval.

Promoting visual long-term memories: When do we learn from repetitions of visuospatial arrays?

“…Hence, as long-term memory traces accumulate, serial-recall performance increases. This effect has been replicated using verbal materials such as digits, letters, syllables, or words (Hebb, 1961;Oberauer et al, 2015;Page & Norris, 2009;Szmalec et al, 2012) as well as visual stimuli such as faces (Horton et al, 2008;Johnson et al, 2017;Johnson & Miles, 2019a, 2019b and spatial locations (Couture & Tremblay, 2006;Sukegawa et al, 2019;Tremblay & Saint-Aubin, 2009).…”

Promoting visual long-term memories: When do we learn from repetitions of visuospatial arrays?

“…Hence, as long-term memory traces accumulate, serial-recall performance increases. This effect has been replicated using verbal materials such as digits, letters, syllables, or words (Hebb, 1961;Oberauer et al, 2015;Page & Norris, 2009;Szmalec et al, 2012) as well as visual stimuli such as faces (Horton et al, 2008;Johnson et al, 2017;Johnson & Miles, 2019a, 2019b and spatial locations (Couture & Tremblay, 2006;Sukegawa et al, 2019;Tremblay & Saint-Aubin, 2009). 4 VISUOSPATIAL LONG-TERM LEARNING However, the repetition benefit is not ubiquitous.…”

Sequential processing facilitates Hebb repetition learning in visuospatial domains.

“…Although most studies on the Hebb repetition effect have targeted phenomena in tasks involving digits or words/syllables (see Hurlstone et al, 2014), it is not limited to the verbal domain. For example, Couture and Tremblay (2006) also observed a Hebb repetition effect in visuospatial short-term memory using a task in which dots were sequentially presented at specific spatial locations and participants were asked to perform an immediate recall of the serial order of the presented dots (see also Horton et al, 2008; Johnson et al, 2017; Johnson & Miles, 2019a, 2019b; Page et al, 2006; Sukegawa et al, 2019 for other materials).…”