One of the central claims associated with the parallel distributed processing approach popularized by D. E. Rumelhart, J. L. McClelland and the PDP Research Group is that knowledge is coded in a distributed fashion. Localist representations within this perspective are widely rejected. It is important to note, however, that connectionist networks…

Reviews three theories of how we retain order in memory and their predictions for errors people make when they recall a sequence incorrectly. A new model of short-term memory is presented, the Start-End Model (SEM), in which the positions of items in a sequence are coded relative to the sequence start and end. (SLD)