It is commonly assumed that orthographical lexical access in visual word recognition takes place in parallel, with all letters activated at the same time. In contrast, in the SERIOL model of letter-position encoding, letters fire sequentially (Whitney, 2001). I present further support for such seriality on several fronts. (1) The reasons that led…

The primacy model is presented as a new model of serial recall. This model stores order information by means of the assumption that the strength of activation of successive list items decreases across list position to form a primary gradient. The model produces accurate simulation of the effects of word length, list length, and phonological…

According to temporal distinctiveness models, items that are temporally isolated from their neighbors during list presentation are more distinct and thus should be recalled better. Event-based theories, by contrast, deny that time plays a role at encoding and predict no beneficial effect of temporal isolation, although they acknowledge that a…