A central goal of research on short-term memory (STM) over the past 2 decades has been to identify the mechanisms that underpin the representation of serial order, and to establish whether these mechanisms are the same across different modalities and domains (e.g., verbal, visual, spatial). A fruitful approach to addressing this question has…

Short-term memory (STM) for serially presented visual items is disrupted by task-irrelevant, to-beignored speech. Five experiments investigated the extent to which irrelevant speech is processed semantically by contrasting the following two hypotheses: (1) semantic processing of irrelevant speech is limited and does not interfere with serial STM…

Task-irrelevant speech impairs short-term serial recall appreciably. On the interference-by-process account, the processing of physical (i.e., precategorical) changes in speech yields order cues that conflict with the serial-ordering process deployed to perform the serial recall task. In this view, the postcategorical properties (e.g., phonology,…

When participants are presented with a short list of unrelated words and they are instructed that they may recall in any order, they nevertheless show a very strong tendency to recall in forward serial order. Thus, if asked to recall "in any orde"r: "hat, mouse, tea, stairs," participants often respond "hat, mouse, tea,…

We examined the contribution of the phonological loop to immediate free recall (IFR) and immediate serial recall (ISR) of lists of between one and 15 words. Following Baddeley (1986, 2000, 2007, 2012), we assumed that visual words could be recoded into the phonological store when presented silently but that recoding would be prevented by…

In 2 experiments, the authors tested whether the classical modality effect--that is, the stronger recency effect for auditory items relative to visual items--can be extended to the spatial domain. An order reconstruction task was undertaken with four types of material: visual-spatial, auditory-spatial, visual-verbal, and auditory-verbal.…

Examined the hypothesis that good and poor readers would differ in their ability to order stimuli that can be easily recoded as words and stored in phonetic form, but not in their ability to order nonlinguistic stimuli that do not lend themselves to phonetic recoding in short-term memory. (Author/DB)