Visual Similarity Effects in Immediate Verbal Serial Recall

Abstract

The role of visual working memory in temporary serial retention of verbal information was examined in four experiments on immediate serial recall of words that varied in visual similarity and letters that varied in the visual consistency between upper and lower case. Experiments 1 and 2 involved words that were either visually similar (e.g. fly, cry, dry; hew, new, few) or were visually distinct (e.g. guy, sigh, lie; who, blue, ewe). Experiments 3 and 4 involved serial recall of both letter and case from sequences of letters chosen such that the upper- and lower-case versions were visually similar, for example Kk, Cc, Zz, Ww, or were visually dissimilar, for example Dd, Hh, Rr, Qq. Hence in the latter set, case information was encoded in terms of both the shape and the size of the letters. With both words and letters, the visually similar items resulted in poorer recall both with and without concurrent articulatory suppression. This visual similarity effect was robust and was replicated across the four experiments. The effect was not restricted to any particular serial position and was particularly salient in the recall of letter case. These data suggest the presence of a visual code for retention of visually presented verbal sequences in addition to a phonological code, and they are consistent with the use of a visual temporary memory, or visual "cache", in verbal serial recall tasks.

On the capacity of attention: Its estimation and its role in working memory and cognitive aptitudes

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Visuospatial bootstrapping: Evidence for binding of verbal and spatial information in working memory

“…Baddeley"s (2000) revised working memory model adds the possibility that relevant long-term knowledge might facilitate encoding and/or retrieval when it is combined with the verbal memory trace in the episodic buffer. The current data are compatible with this revised model Our interpretation is that the higher performance in the keypad condition was caused by integration of long-term knowledge about the very familiar telephone keypad.…”

“…However, experimental results suggest that such separation is not absolute : Baddeley, Lewis and Vallar (1984) observed that when concurrent articulation was employed to prevent the use of the phonological loop, participants" recall of visually presented digits was reduced, but not eliminated. Logie, Della Sala, Wynn and Baddeley (2000) demonstrated visual similarity effects on a verbal serial recall task. The "episodic buffer" (Baddeley, 2000) is a proposed secondary memory store that was developed in part to help understand these patterns.…”

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“…This is attributed to interference caused in the memory trace when trying to store and retrieve items with similar visual characteristics (e.g. Frick, 1988a;1988b;Hitch, Halliday, Schaafstal, & Schraagen, 1988; Coding strategies in picture memory span 8 Logie, Della Sala, Wynn & Baddeley, 2000). Visual coding has often been reported in samples of fiveyear-olds but not in older children (Brown, 1977;Hayes & Schulze, 1977;Hitch et al, 1988;Hitch, Woodin & Baker, 1989;Hitch et al, 1991;Longoni & Scalisi, 1994;Palmer, 2000a).…”