EXPRESS: The Working Memory Model and the relationship between immediate serial recall and immediate free recall.

The effects of speech-based variables on the immediate serial recall (ISR) task constitute fundamental evidence underpinning the concept of the Phonological Loop component of Working Memory. Somewhat surprisingly, the Phonological Loop has yet to be applied to the immediate free recall (IFR) task even though both tasks share similar memoranda and presentation methods. We believe that the separation of theories of ISR and IFR has contributed to the historical divergence between the Working Memory and Episodic Memory literatures. We review more recent evidence showing that the two tasks are approached by participants in similar ways, with similar encoding and rehearsal strategies, and are similarly affected by manipulations of word length, phonological similarity, articulatory suppression/concurrent articulation, and irrelevant speech/sound. We present new analyses showing that the outputs of the two tasks share similar runs of successive items that include the first and last items- which we term start- and end-sequences, respectively - that the remaining residual items exhibit strong recency effects, and that start- and end-sequences impose constraints on output order that help account for error transposition gradients in ISR. Such analyses suggest that similar mechanisms might convey serial order information in the two tasks. We believe that recency effects are often under-appreciated in theories of ISR, and IFR mechanisms could generate error transpositions. We hope that our review and new analyses encourage greater theoretical integration between ISR and IFR, and between the Working Memory and Episodic Memory literatures.

EXPRESS: Investigating a Metrical Hebb Effect for lists of words.

In four experiments, we describe the first finding of a Metrical Hebb Effect. Participants are shown to exhibit a Hebb Repetition Effect for repeating, list-wide stress patterns across sequences of familiar words, even though the lexical items within the "repeating" lists do not themselves repeat. Experiment 1 established the presence of a Hebb effect for metrical patterns, demonstrating significant learning of list-wide metrical patterns over successive presentations. Experiment 2 investigated the effect's longevity, showing persistence of learned metrical information after a spacing of three non-repeating lists. Experiment 3 revealed that the effect did not persist over a longer spacing, of eight intervening lists. Experiment 4 investigated the learning mechanism, suggesting that chunking, rather than item-position binding, might account for the observed learning of metrical patterns. The authors propose that metrical-pattern learning represents a process of gradual integration of sequences of weak and strong stress accents, into higher-level units representing the stress patterns within, and across, words. We briefly discuss some implications of the Metrical Hebb Effect for phonological word-form learning, and for speech perception and production.

The phonological store of working memory: A critique and an alternative, perceptual-motor, approach to verbal short-term memory.

A key quality of a good theory is its fruitfulness, one measure of which might be the degree to which it compels researchers to test it, refine it, or offer alternative explanations of the same empirical data. Perhaps the most fruitful element of Baddeley and Hitch's (1974) Working Memory framework has been the concept of a short-term phonological store, a discrete cognitive module dedicated to the passive storage of verbal material that is architecturally fractionated from perceptual, language, and articulatory systems. This review discusses how the phonological store construct has served as the main theoretical springboard for an alternative perceptual-motor approach in which serial-recall performance reflects the opportunistic co-opting of the articulatory-planning system and, when auditory material is involved, the products of obligatory auditory perceptual organisation. It is argued that this approach, which rejects the need to posit a distinct short-term store, provides a better account of the two putative empirical hallmarks of the phonological store-the phonological similarity effect and the irrelevant speech effect-and that it shows promise too in being able to account for nonword repetition and word-form learning, the supposed evolved function of the phonological store. The neuropsychological literature cited as strong additional support for the phonological store concept is also scrutinised through the lens of the perceptual-motor approach for the first time and a tentative articulatory-planning deficit hypothesis for the "short-term memory" patient profile is advanced. Finally, the relation of the perceptual-motor approach to other "emergent-property" accounts of short-term memory is briefly considered.

Give me enough time to rehearse: presentation rate modulates the production effect.

This paper uses the production effect to test one of the important predictions of a view of memory that is embodied in the Revised Feature Model (RFM). When to-be-recalled lists contain items both read aloud and silently, words read aloud are less well recalled at the beginning of the list and better recalled at the end. According to the RFM, producing the items by reading them aloud adds distinctive features which supports recall, but production also interferes with rehearsal - a process that operates more significantly at the start of a list. This critical role assigned to rehearsal has never been systematically tested. We do this here through a systematic literature review and an experiment that manipulates presentation rate. With a faster presentation rate, rehearsal is less likely; the implication is that the advantage observed for silently read items in the primacy positions should vanish, while the recency advantage for produced items should remain. The systematic review collected an initial sample of 422 unique articles on the production effect in immediate serial recall and revealed the predicted pattern. In addition, in our experiment, the presentation rate was manipulated within an immediate serial recall task (500, 1,000, and 2,000 ms/word). As predicted, the recency advantage for produced items was observed for all presentation speeds. Critically, the production disadvantage for early serial positions was only present for the two slowest rates, but not at the fastest speed. Results were successfully modeled by calling upon the RFM.

The emergence of all-or-none retrieval of chunks in verbal serial recall.

People often subdivide a list into smaller pieces, called chunks. Some theories of serial recall assume memories are stored hierarchically, with all-or-none retrieval of chunks, but most mathematical models avoid hierarchical assumptions. Johnson (Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 8(6), 725-731, 1969) found steep drops in errors following correct recalls (transitional-error probabilities) within putative chunks during multi-trial letter-list learning, and viewed this as evidence for all-or-none retrieval. Here we test whether all-or-none retrieval occurs in lists studied only once. In serial recall of six-word lists (Experiment 1), transitional-error probabilities were inconsistent with all-or-none retrieval, both when participants were instructed to subdivide and when temporal grouping induced subdivision. Curiously, the same analysis of previous temporally grouped nine-letter lists produced compelling evidence for all-or-none retrieval, which may result from recoding rather than the formation of chunks. In Experiment 2, participants were pre-trained on three-word chunks. For nine-word lists constructed from those trained chunks, transitional-error probabilities exhibited more pronounced evidence of all-or-none retrieval. Nearly all effects reversed with post-cued backward recall, suggesting mechanisms that play out over the course of recall rather than encoding of the list. In sum, subdivided lists do not result in hierarchical memories after a single study trial, although they may emerge in lists formed from chunks that are previously learned as such. This suggests a continuous transition from non-hierarchical subdivision of lists to all-or-none retrieval over the course of chunk formation.

The orthographic/phonological neighbourhood size effect and set size.

A growing number of studies have shown that on serial recall tests, words with more orthographic/phonological neighbours are better recalled than otherwise comparable words with fewer neighbours, the so-called neighbourhood size effect. Greeno et al. replicated this result when using a large stimulus pool but found a reverse neighbourhood size effect-better recall of words with fewer rather than more neighbours-when using a small stimulus pool. We report three registered experiments that further examine the role of set size in the neighbourhood size effect. Experiment 1 used the large pool from Greeno et al. and replicated their finding of a large-neighbourhood advantage. Experiment 2 used the small pool from Greeno et al. but found no difference in recall between the large and small neighbourhood conditions. Experiment 3 also used a small pool but the small pool was randomly generated for each subject from the large pool used in Experiment 1. This resulted in a typical large neighbourhood advantage. We suggest that set size is not critical to the direction of the neighbourhood size effect, with a large neighbourhood advantage appearing with both small and large pools.

The impact of a speaker's voice quality on auditory perception and cognition: a behavioral and subjective approach.

Introduction: Our voice is key for conveying information and knowledge to others during verbal communication. However, those who heavily depend on their voice, such as teachers and university professors, often develop voice problems, signaled by hoarseness. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of hoarseness on listeners' memory for auditory-verbal information, listening effort, and listening impression. Methods: Forty-eight normally hearing adults performed two memory tasks that were auditorily presented in varied voice quality (typical vs. hoarse). The tasks were Heard Text Recall, as part of a dual-task paradigm, and auditory Verbal Serial Recall (aVSR). Participants also completed a listening impression questionnaire for both voice qualities. Behavioral measures of memory for auditory-verbal information and listening effort were performance and response time. Subjective measures of listening effort and other aspects of listening impression were questionnaire rating scores. Results: Results showed that, except for the aVSR, behavioral outcomes did not vary with the speaker's voice quality. Regarding the aVSR, we found a significant interaction between voice quality and trial, indicating that participants' recall performance dropped in the beginning of the task in the hoarse-voice condition but not in the typical-voice condition, and then increased again toward the end. Results from the listening impression questionnaire showed that listening to the hoarse voice resulted in significantly increased perceived listening effort, greater annoyance and poorer self-reported performance. Discussion: These findings suggest that hoarseness can, at least subjectively, compromise effective listening. Vocal health may be particularly important in the educational context, where listening and learning are closely linked.

Lexico-syntactic constraints influence verbal working memory in sentence-like lists.

We test predictions from the language emergent perspective on verbal working memory that lexico-syntactic constraints should support both item and order memory. In natural language, long-term knowledge of lexico-syntactic patterns involving part of speech, verb biases, and noun animacy support language comprehension and production. In three experiments, participants were presented with randomly generated dative-like sentences or lists in which part of speech, verb biases, and animacy of a single word were manipulated. Participants were more likely to recall words in the correct position when presented with a verb over a noun in the verb position, a good dative verb over an intransitive verb in the verb position, and an animate noun over an inanimate noun in the subject noun position. These results demonstrate that interactions between words and their context in the form of lexico-syntactic constraints influence verbal working memory.

When Does Episodic Memory Contribute to Performance in Tests of Working Memory?

Both the experimental and the psychometric investigation of the WM capacity limit depend critically on the assumption that performance in our tests of WM reflects that capacity limit to a good approximation. Most tasks to measure WM rely on testing memory after a short time during which participants are asked to maintain information in WM. In these tests, episodic long-term memory is likely to also lay down a trace of the memory set. Therefore, participants can draw on two sources of information when memory is tested, making it difficult to separate the contributions of WM and episodic LTM to the performance on immediate-memory tests. Here we use proactive interference to distinguish between these two sources of remembered information, building on the fact that episodic memory is vulnerable to proactive interference, whereas WM is protected against it. We use a release-from-PI paradigm to determine the extent to which commonly used WM tasks reflect contributions from episodic LTM. We focus on memory for serial order of verbal lists, but also include visual and spatial WM tasks. The results of five experiments demonstrate that although some tasks used to investigate WM are heavily contaminated by episodic LTM, other popular paradigms such as serial and probed recall, and the standard version of the continuous color-reproduction task, are not. Measuring proactive interference can help researchers determine the extent to which WM and episodic LTM contribute to performance in immediate-memory tasks.

Irrelevant speech, changing state, and order information.

The changing state effect is the finding that a stream of irrelevant sounds that change more (e.g., different digits in random order) disrupts memory more than a stream of irrelevant sounds that change less (e.g., a single digit repeated over and over). According to the Object-Oriented Episodic Record (O-OER) model, the changing state effect will be observed only in memory tasks that have an order component or which induce serial rehearsal or serial processing. In contrast, other accounts-including the Feature Model, the Primacy Model, and various attentional theories-predict that the changing state effect should be observable when there is no order component. Experiment 1 first demonstrated that the irrelevant stimuli created for the current experiments produced a changing state effect in immediate serial recall in both on-campus and online samples. Then, three experiments assessed whether a changing state effect is observable in a surprise 2AFC recognition test. Experiment 2 replicated Stokes and Arnell (2012, Memory & Cognition, 40, 918-931), who found that although irrelevant sounds reduce performance on a surprise recognition test of words presented previously in a lexical decision task, they do not produce a changing state effect. Experiments 3 and 4 used two different encoding tasks (pleasantness and frequency judgment) and also found no changing state effect. The results support the prediction of the O-OER model and provide additional evidence against the other accounts.

Effect of Spatial Contiguity on Learning Sequences of Positions / Efecto de la contigüidad espacial sobre el aprendizaje de secuencias de posiciones

Abstract Four conditions of spatial contiguity of positions were used to assess sequence learning. Two sequences of 16 and 25 positions presented in two matrices of 4x4 and 5x5 respectively were used. Within each matrix, 4 (in the 4x4 matrix) or 6 positions (in the 5x5 matrix) presented spatial contiguity. The place at the sequence in which contiguous positions occurred varied across groups. In this way, spatial contiguity of the 4 or 6 positions was presented at the beginning of the sequence (Group 1), in the middle part (Group 2), at the end of the sequence (Group 3) or it was presented a sequence in which all positions occurred without spatial contiguity (Group 4). 28 undergraduate students participated. Results showed no differences among groups in the number of trials required to reproduce the sequence correctly. Number of errors was lower when contiguous positions were presented at the beginning of the sequence. These findings are explained as a possible effect of accentuation of primacy given by the occurrence of contiguous positions at the beginning of the sequence.

Resumen Cuatro condiciones de contigüidad espacial de posiciones fueron empleadas para evaluar el aprendizaje de secuencias. Se emplearon dos secuencias de 16 y 25 posiciones presentadas en dos matrices de 4x4 y 5x5, respectivamente. Dentro de cada matriz, 4 (en la matriz de 4x4) o 6 posiciones (en la matriz de 5x5) presentaron contigüidad espacial. Entre grupos, se varió el punto de la secuencia en el que se presentaron las posiciones contiguas. De este modo, la contigüidad espacial de las 4 o 6 posiciones se presentó al inicio de la secuencia (Grupo 1), en la parte media (Grupo 2), al final de la secuencia (Grupo 3), o bien, se presentó una secuencia en la que todas las posiciones ocurrieron sin contigüidad espacial (Grupo 4). Participaron 28 estudiantes de licenciatura. Los resultados no mostraron diferencias entre grupos en cuanto al número de ensayos requeridos para reproducir la secuencia correctamente. El número de errores fue menor cuando las posiciones contiguas se presentaron al inicio de la secuencia. Los hallazgos se explican a partir de un posible efecto de acentuación de la primacía, dado por la ocurrencia de posiciones contiguas al inicio de la secuencia.

Exploring the necessary conditions for phonological interference in serial recall.

This paper explores the impact of phonological overlap amongst items on short term memory recall performance by manipulating the type, number and syllabic position of shared phonemes between words in a serial recall task. Roodenrys et al [Roodenrys, S., Miller., L. M., & Josifoski, N. (2022b). Phonemic interference in short-term memory contributes to forgetting but it is not due to overwriting. Journal of Memory and Language, 122, 104301. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2021.104301] demonstrated that when the phonemes of a target word also occur in words earlier in the list, recall of the target word is impaired. Two experiments are reported that further examine the nature of this interference effect. Experiment 1 varied the type and number of phonemes shared with the single syllable target word by other list words and found a single shared vowel impaired target word recall performance as much as two shared consonants. Experiment 2 altered the syllabic position of the overlapping phonemes and found shared syllabic position was necessary to impair recall of the target word. It is argued these results show that not all phonological overlap is equally detrimental and specific psycholinguistic conditions are necessary to produce interference that impairs recall performance.

Task-specific auditory distraction in serial recall and mental arithmetic.

Previous studies suggest that task-irrelevant changing-state sound interferes specifically with the processing of serial order information in the focal task (e.g., serial recall from short-term memory), whereas a deviant sound in the auditory background is supposed to divert central attention, thus producing distraction in various types of cognitive tasks. Much of the evidence for this distinction rests on the observed dissociations in auditory distraction between serial and non-serial short-term memory tasks. In this study, both the changing-state effect and the deviation effect were contrasted between serial digit recall and mental arithmetic tasks. In three experiments (two conducted online), changing-state sound was found to disrupt serial recall, but it did not lead to a general decrement in performance in different mental arithmetic tasks. In contrast, a deviant voice in the stream of irrelevant speech sounds did not cause reliable distraction in serial recall and simple addition/subtraction tasks, but it did disrupt a more demanding mental arithmetic task. Specifically, the evaluation of math equations (multiplication and addition/subtraction), which was combined with a pair-associate memory task to increase the task demand, was found to be susceptible to auditory distraction in participants who did not serially rehearse the pair-associates. Together, the results support the assumption that the interference produced by changing-state sound is highly specific to tasks that require serial-order processing, whereas auditory deviants may cause attentional capture primarily in highly demanding cognitive tasks (e.g., mental arithmetic) that cannot be solved through serial rehearsal.

Irrelevant speech impairs serial recall of verbal but not spatial items in children and adults.

Immediate serial recall of visually presented items is reliably impaired by task-irrelevant speech that the participants are instructed to ignore ("irrelevant speech effect," ISE). The ISE is stronger with changing speech tokens (words or syllables) when compared to repetitions of single tokens ("changing-state effect," CSE). These phenomena have been attributed to sound-induced diversions of attention away from the focal task (attention capture account), or to specific interference of obligatory, involuntary sound processing with either the integrity of phonological traces in a phonological short-term store (phonological loop account), or the efficiency of a domain-general rehearsal process employed for serial order retention (changing-state account). Aiming to further explore the role of attention, phonological coding, and serial order retention in the ISE, we analyzed the effects of steady-state and changing-state speech on serial order reconstruction of visually presented verbal and spatial items in children (n = 81) and adults (n = 80). In the verbal task, both age groups performed worse with changing-state speech (sequences of different syllables) when compared with steady-state speech (one syllable repeated) and silence. Children were more impaired than adults by both speech sounds. In the spatial task, no disruptive effect of irrelevant speech was found in either group. These results indicate that irrelevant speech evokes similarity-based interference, and thus pose difficulties for the attention-capture and the changing-state account of the ISE.

Additional evidence that valence does not affect serial recall.

In immediate serial recall, a canonical short-term memory task, it is well established that performance is affected by several sublexical, lexical, and semantic factors. One factor that receives a growing interest is valence, whether a word is categorised as positive (e.g., happy) or as negative (e.g., pain). However, contradictory findings have recently emerged. Tse and Altarriba in two experiments with one set of stimuli and fixed lists concluded that valence affects serial recall performance, while Bireta et al. in three experiments with three sets of stimuli and randomised lists concluded that valence does not affect serial recall performance. Two experiments assessed the experimental discrepancy between Tse and Altarriba and Bireta et al. For both experiments, in one block, every participant saw the exact same lists as those used in Tse and Altarriba, and in the other block, each list was randomly constructed for each participant, as was done in Bireta et al. In Experiment 1, with concrete words varying in valence, we replicated the results of Tse and Altarriba with fixed lists and the results of Bireta et al. with randomised lists. In Experiment 2, with abstract words with both fixed and randomised lists, we replicate the absence of effect valence like Tse and Altarriba and Bireta et al. Overall, we conclude that valence does not affect serial recall and the discrepancy was attributed to the peculiarity of the fixed lists used by Tse and Altarriba.

An easy way to improve scoring of memory span tasks: The edit distance, beyond "correct recall in the correct serial position".

For researchers and psychologists interested in estimating a subject's memory capacity, the current standard for scoring memory span tasks is the partial-credit method: subjects are credited with the number of stimuli that they manage to recall correctly in the correct serial position. A critical issue with this method, however, is that intrusions and omissions can radically change the scores depending on where they occur. For example, when recalling the sequence ABCDE, "ABCD" is worth 4 points but "BCDE" is worth 0 points. This paper presents an improved scoring method based on the edit distance, meaning the number of changes required to edit the recalled sequence into the target. Edit-distance scoring gives results close to partial-credit scoring, but without the corresponding vulnerability to positional shifts. A reanalysis of memory performance in two large datasets (N = 1093 and N = 758) confirms that in addition to being more logically consistent, edit-distance scoring demonstrates similar or better psychometric properties than partial-credit, with comparable validity, a small increase in reliability, and a substantial increase of test information (measurement precision in the context of item response theory). Test information was especially improved for harder items and for subjects with ability in the lower range, whose scores tend to be severely underestimated by partial-credit scoring. Code to compute edit-distance scores with various software is made available at https://osf.io/wdb83/ .

Semantic Relatedness Effects in Serial Recall But Not in Serial Reconstruction of Order.

Lists of semantically related words are better recalled than lists of unrelated words on immediate serial recall tests. Prominent explanations for this beneficial effect of semantic relatedness, such as the item/order hypothesis, invoke differential contributions of item and order information and predict that on tests that de-emphasize item information, the effect of semantic relatedness will be abolished. The prediction is hard to assess because previous studies using reconstruction of order tests show conflicting and equivocal results. Three experiments are reported that were designed to minimize problems associated with extant studies and that will allow reassessment of the prediction that semantic relatedness will have no effect on reconstruction of order tests. The experiments replicated the usual beneficial effect of semantic relatedness on memory when the test was serial recall but found no effect when the test was reconstruction of order. These results were observed regardless of whether semantic relatedness was defined by category membership (Experiment 1), association (Experiment 2), or meaning (Experiment 3). These results clarify earlier results in the literature and confirm a strong prediction of the item/order hypothesis.

Phonological similarity in the serial recall task hinders item recall, not just order.

The phonological similarity effect in short-term memory (STM) is the finding that serial recall of lists of similar sounding items is poorer than that of dissimilar sounding items. This is traditionally argued to be due to a detrimental effect on memory for the order of the words in the list and not on memory for the words themselves. Models that propose forgetting from STM is due to interference must invoke an additional compensatory process where the shared element of the words acts as a cue to recall, in order to account for the lack of an effect on memory for the words. However, the possibility of a detrimental effect of phonological similarity on item memory when these compensatory processes are not available has not been investigated. Two experiments (n = 60 and n = 57) in which similarity is operationalized in a way that precludes usage of compensatory processes are reported. The results clearly demonstrate that item recall is poorer for similar lists than dissimilar lists when similarity is defined in this way.

Backward recall and foreknowledge of recall direction: a test of the Encoding-Retrieval Matching Hypothesis.

When participants must recall a sequence of items in reverse order just after their presentation, inconsistent findings have been observed relative to when participants must recall a sequence in their presentation order. Recently, the Encoding-Retrieval Matching Hypothesis (ERM) has been developed to account for these inconsistencies. Within the ERM hypothesis, foreknowledge of recall direction plays an important role. In two experiments, we tested a key prediction of the ERM hypothesis: In backward recall with foreknowledge of recall direction, the size of the effect will vary as a function of its reliance on visuospatial representations. Participants performed an immediate serial recall task with digits. As predicted, the detrimental effect of manual-spatial tapping was larger in backward recall relative to forward recall when recall direction was predictable (Experiment 1b), but not when it was unpredictable (Experiment 1a). In Experiment 2, the word length effect, not relying on visuospatial representations, was equally large in forward and backward recall, and it was unaffected by foreknowledge of recall direction. Overall, the results support the predictions derived from the ERM hypothesis and contribute to the delineation of when and how foreknowledge can influence backward recall performance relative to forward recall performance.

Independent effects of word concreteness and word valence on immediate serial recall.

The present study examined the roles of word concreteness and word valence in the immediate serial recall task. Emotion words (e.g. happy) were used to investigate these effects. Participants completed study-test trials with 7-item study lists consisting of positive or negative words with either high or low concreteness (Experiments 1 and 2) and neutral (i.e. non-emotion) words with either high or low concreteness (Experiment 2). In serial recall performance, we replicated the typical item concreteness effect (concrete words are better recalled than abstract words) and obtained an item valence effect (positive/neutral words are better recalled than negative words). However, there was no concreteness × valence interaction. We conclude that both word valence and word concreteness independently contribute to the serial order retention of emotion words in the immediate serial recall task.