Long-term mediational processes

Abstract

A general paradigm for studying the interplay between STM processing under conditions of divided attention and recently acquired cognitive structures is presented. The paradigm requires the acquisition of an n-tuple by the usual serial anticipation method. Subsequently, selected subspan subsets of these items or synonyms or homophones of the corresponding (position for position) serially ordered items are presented for ordered recall in the Brown-Peterson paradigm. Two preliminary experiments are presented. Both demonstrate mediated facilitation of STM processing. The degree of facilitation depends on such LTM variables as the direction of associations of adjacent items and the location of the items in the long-term serial order, as well as the similarity of the items in STM to those in corresponding LTM positions. The role of item availability in assessing mediated facilitation of order information is discussed.