We used the timing of serial recall in several situations to reveal important aspects of recall groupings that participants construct and the reasons those groupings occur. We examined the timing of responses in the recall of digit strings within two published experiments. Cowan, Saults, Elliott, and Moreno (2002) examined memory for nine-item…

Structural priming is the tendency to repeat syntactic structure across sentences and can be divided into short-term (prime to immediately following target) and long-term (across an experimental session) components. This study investigates how nondeclarative memory could support both the transient, short-term and the persistent, long-term…

Recent evidence suggests substantial response-time costs associated with lag-2 repetitions of tasks within explicitly controlled task sequences [Koch, I., Philipp, A. M., Gade, M. (2006). Chunking in task sequences modulates task inhibition. "Psychological Science," 17, 346-350; Schneider, D. W. (2007). Task-set inhibition in chunked task…

Several competing theories of short-term memory can explain serial recall performance at a quantitative level. However, most theories to date have not been applied to the accompanying pattern of response latencies, thus ignoring a rich and highly diagnostic aspect of performance. This article explores and tests the error latency predictions of…

This study explored the degree of verbal short-term memory deficit among individuals with Down syndrome and Williams syndrome, and the extent to which any such impairment could be accounted for by a relative slowing of rehearsal and output processes. Measures of serial recall and detailed assessments of speeded articulation for short and long…

Background: Individuals with Down syndrome consistently perform less well than appropriately matched comparison groups on tests of verbal short-term memory, despite performing relatively well on non-verbal short-term memory tasks. However, it is not clear whether these findings constitute evidence for a selective deficit in verbal short-term…