Individuals of all ages extract structure from the sequences of patterns they encounter in their environment, an ability that is at the very heart of cognition. Exactly what underlies this ability has been the subject of much debate over the years. A novel mechanism, implicit chunk recognition (ICR), is proposed for sequence segmentation and chunk…

Seven experiments are described investigating the effecy of high intensity white noise during the visual presentation of words on a number of short-term memory tasks. Examines results relative to position learning and sequence learning. (Editor/RK)