Order and position in primary memory for letter strings

Abstract

A short-term recall task in which to-be-remembered letters were spaced out in different ways by distractor digits, and all were shadowed during input to preclude rehearsal, was used to separate aspects of primary and secondary memory processes and to permit examination of primary memory for position, order, and item independently. Under conditions contrived to minimize the contribution of secondary processes, memory for order appeared entirely derivative to memory for temporal position and all of the principal trends in both aspects were well predicted by an associative coding model assuming a reverberatory recycling process. Variation in intrastring acoustic confusability of letters yielded a complex pattern of interactions that seems unexplainable by any extant model but suggests specific lines of augmentation of the associative coding model.