Temporal grouping and direction of serial recall
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Temporal grouping and direction of serial recall Yang S. Liu1 · Jeremy B. Caplan2 Published online: 23 July 2020 © The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2020
Abstract When lists are presented with temporal pauses between groups of items, participants’ response times reiterate those pauses. Accuracy is also increased, especially at particular serial positions. By comparing forward with backward serial recall, we tested whether the influence of temporal grouping is primarily a function of serial position or output position. Results favored the latter, both when recall direction was known to participants prior to (Experiment 1) or only after (Experiment 2) studying each list. Alongside fits of variants of a temporal distinctiveness-based model, our findings suggest that the influence of temporal grouping is not just a consequence of grouping information stored during the study phase. Rather, it critically depends on participants cueing with within-chunk position during recall, combined with response suppression. Keywords Serial recall · Order memory · Memory models · Grouping · Response suppression
Introduction Memory for sequences is widely understood to be at the core of a broad range of human behavior (e.g., Ebbinghaus, 1885/1913; Lashley, 1951). Accordingly, a major goal of memory research has been to determine how serial lists are stored and retrieved, with particular focus on the immediate serial-recall paradigm. In immediate serial recall, participants are presented with a list of items, such as consonants, for study, then asked to reproduce the list in order. This procedure resembles everyday tasks like remembering a phone number long enough to enter it into a smart phone or remembering a line of song lyrics long enough to repeat it in a pop concert. The effect of temporal grouping is prominent among the major empirical findings
Data can be accessed from https://osf.io/evmct/?view\protect only=be14d124209442f8882e476f812965b6 Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-020-01049-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. Yang S. Liu
[email protected] 1
Department of Psychiatry, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB T6G 2R3, Canada
2
Department of Psychology and Neuroscience and Mental Health Institute, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB T6G 2E9, Canada
that have been used to constrain and guide the development of mathematical models of serial recall. Introduced by Ryan (1969a, b), longer pauses are introduced between subgroups of items, while equating total list presentation time. For example, a list of nine consonants might be subdivided into three groups of three letters. Resulting plots of accuracy show a scalloping effect (e.g., Hitch et al., 1996; Ng & Maybery, 2002; Ryan, 1969a; 1969b), with a relative recall advantage for the first and last item of each temporally defined group (e.g., items 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, and 9) compared the respective middle-group items. The dominant theoretical account of the advantage of grouped ov
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