Serial Recognition Task Research Articles

Phonological Memory and L2 Vocabulary Learning in a Narrated Story Task.

The objective of this study was to explore the role played by phonological memory (PM) in the learning of new second language (L2) vocabulary presented in a narrated story. The proposal was that individuals with a strong PM would do better on this largely auditory task than those with poor PM capacity, since fewer visual/written cues could make remembering vocabulary a more challenging task. Participants were French native speakers, advanced learners of English (N = 55). The results revealed that PM, measured by a nonword repetition task and a serial recognition task, did not predict vocabulary retention scores in the group as a whole. However, when low and high PM subgroups were formed, a significant association between PM and vocabulary retention was found in the low PM group only, suggesting the contribution of PM to short-term vocabulary learning in advanced learners is outweighed by other factors, except when PM is quite weak.

Short-term Recognition of Timbre Sequences

The goal of the current study was to explore outstanding questions in the field of timbre perception and cognition—specifically, whether memory for timbre is better in trained musicians or in nonmusicians, whether short-term timbre recognition is invariant to pitch differences, and whether timbre dissimilarity influences timbre recognition performance. Four experiments examined short-term recognition of musical timbre using a serial recognition task in which listeners indicated whether the orders of the timbres of two subsequently presented sound sequences were identical or not. Experiment 1 revealed significant effects of sequence length on recognition accuracy and an interaction of music training and pitch variability: musicians performed better for variable-pitch sequences, but did not differ from nonmusicians with constant-pitch sequences. Experiment 2 yielded a significant effect of pitch variability for musicians when pitch patterns varied between standard and comparison sequences. Experiment 3 high-lighted the impact of the timbral dissimilarity of swapped sounds and indicated a recency effect in timbre recognition. Experiment 4 confirmed the importance of the dissimilarity of the swap, but did not yield any pertinent role of timbral heterogeneity of the sequence. Further analyses confirmed the strong correlation of the timbral dissimilarity of swapped sounds with response behavior, accounting for around 90% of the variance in response choices across all four experiments. These results extend findings regarding the impact of music training and pitch variability from the literature on timbre perception to the domain of short-term memory and demonstrate the mnemonic importance of timbre similarity relations among sounds in sequences. The role of the factors of music training, pitch variability, and timbral similarity in music listening is discussed.

Visual-spatial and verbal-spatial binding in working memory.

asymmetric pattern of binding of features in working memory is a controversial topic in the literature. The binding of visual- spatial and verbal-spatial information was studied in a serial recognition task to address the contribution of spatial location, visual appearance, and verbal identity to binding in working memory. The participants (n = 32) made a recognition judgment of two sequences of four stimuli each based on a relevant dimension while ignoring changes in an irrelevant dimension. In the visual and verbal tasks, the location was irrelevant. In the spatial tasks, the visual or verbal dimension was irrelevant. Our data showed that the visual or verbal characteristics of the object were incidentally encoded with the spatial location, but the spatial location of the items was not codified together with either the verbal features or visual characteristics when a verbal strategy was limited by articulatory suppression. This asymmetry in binding memory when the participants had to retain one of the features that was presented suggests a functional interaction between specific components of modalities of information and a system that maintains the multimodal representation. Keywords: working memory, binding, visual-spatial, verbal-spatial.

Electrophysiological indices of altered working memory processes in long‐term ecstasy users

The aim of this study was to determine the effect of light long-term ecstasy consumption on verbal short-term and working memory and to identify the cognitive processes contributing to task performance. Electroencephalogram was recorded while ecstasy users (N = 11), polydrug users (N = 13), and non-users (N = 13) completed forward and backward serial recognition tasks designed to engage verbal short-term memory and verbal working memory, respectively. All three groups displayed significantly lower digit-backward span than digit-forward span with ecstasy users displaying the greatest difference. The parietally distributed P3b was significantly smaller in the digits backward task than in the digits forward task in non-ecstasy-using controls. Ecstasy users did not show the reduced P3b component in the backward task that was seen in both non-ecstasy-using control groups. Ecstasy users' performance was suppressed more by the concurrent processing demands of the working memory task than that of the non-ecstasy-using controls. Non-ecstasy-using controls showed differential event-related potential wave forms in the short-term and working memory tasks, and this pattern was not seen in the ecstasy users. This is consistent with a reduction in the cognitive resources allocated to processing in working memory in ecstasy users.

Spatial clustering and hierarchical coding in immediate serial recall

Four experiments are reported that demonstrate the benefits of clustering by spatial proximity in spatial serial recall and provide support for the notion that hierarchical coding underpins the retention of clustered sequences in spatial working memory. Sequences segregated by spatial clusters increased serial recall performance at different levels of sequence length in a variation of the Corsi test and produced a faster initial response time (RT), which indicates that they afforded data reducing processes. RT at cluster boundary increased in parallel with the number of items forming the clusters, suggesting that subroutines of different length were responsible for the ordering of items within clusters of different size. Evidence for hierarchical coding was also obtained in a serial recognition task, indicating this type of representation pertains to the retention of the sequences rather than exclusively to the organisation of the motor plan for the reproduction of the sequences.

The Effect of Word Length in Short-Term Memory: Is Rehearsal Necessary?

Three experiments investigated the effect of word length on a serial recognition task when rehearsal was prevented by a high presentation rate with no delay between study and test lists. Results showed that lists of short four-phoneme words were better recognized than lists of long six-phoneme words. Moreover, this effect was equivalent to that observed in conditions in which there was a delay between lists, thereby making rehearsal possible in the interval. These findings imply that rehearsal does not play a central role in the origin of the word length effect. An alternative explanation based on differences in the degree of retroactive interference generated by long and short words is proposed.

Disruption of order information by irrelevant items: A serial recognition paradigm

Irrelevant speech effect (ISE) is defined as a decrement in visually presented digit-list short-term memory performance due to exposure to irrelevant auditory material. Perhaps the most successful theoretical explanation of the effect is the changing state hypothesis. This hypothesis explains the effect in terms of confusion between amodal serial order cues, and represents a view based on the interference caused by the processing of similar order information of the visual and auditory materials. An alternative view suggests that the interference occurs as a consequence of the similarity between the visual and auditory contents of the stimuli. An important argument for the former view is the observation that ISE is almost exclusively observed in tasks that require memory for serial order. However, most short-term memory tasks require that both item and order information be retained in memory. An ideal task to investigate the sensitivity of maintenance of serial order to irrelevant speech would be one that calls upon order information but not item information. One task that is particularly suited to address this issue is serial recognition. In a typical serial recognition task, a list of items is presented and then probed by the same list in which the order of two adjacent items has been transposed. Due to the re-presentation of the encoding string, serial recognition requires primarily the serial order to be maintained while the content of the presented items is deemphasized. In demonstrating a highly significant ISE of changing versus steady-state auditory items in a serial recognition task, the present finding lends support for and extends previous empirical findings suggesting that irrelevant speech has the potential to interfere with the coding of the order of the items to be memorized.

The phonological similarity effect in serial recognition

An experiment is reported examining the effect of consistent phonemic similarity among list items on memory retention in a task that is independent of overt speech production, the serial recognition task. Lists of consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) words and nonwords were constructed such that although phoneme overlap was manipulated (i.e., shared vowel and final consonant [_VC], initial consonant and vowel [CV_], or the two consonants [C_C]), similarity remained constant. The results show that the influence of sub-syllabic mechanisms on STM performance is independent of speech production processes, and similarity in the pattern of results suggests that the same mechanisms subserve the recall of words and nonwords in STM. It is argued that the results are more consistent with psycholinguistic models than nonlinguistic models of STM, and implications for current STM models are discussed.

Dissociable lexical and phonological influences on serial recognition and serial recall.

The impact of the lexicality of memory items on memory performance was compared in two paradigms, serial recall and serial recognition. Experiments 1 to 3 tested 7- and 8-year-old children. Memory accuracy was only mildly impaired in lists containing nonwords compared with words in a serial recognition task involving judgments of whether the items in two sequences were in the same order (Experiment 1), although a substantial advantage for word over nonword items from the same stimulus pool was found in serial recall (Experiment 2). A stronger influence of lexicality on serial recall than serial recognition was further demonstrated in Experiments 3A and 3B, and in 4A and 4B using adult participants. These experiments also established comparable degrees of sensitivity to the phonological similarity of the memory sequences in the two paradigms. The phonological similarity effect in serial recall was found to arise from increased phoneme order errors, whereas the lexicality effect was due principally to the greater frequency of phoneme identity errors for nonwords. It is proposed that the lexicality effect originates in the redintegration of item information just prior to recall, and that this process is largely bypassed in serial recognition.

Responses of neurons in the inferior temporal cortex in short term and serial recognition memory tasks.

Gaffan and Weiskrantz (1980) and Mishkin (1982) have shown that lesions to the inferior temporal visual cortex can impair the performance of serial visual recognition memory tasks. In order to provide evidence on whether the inferior temporal visual cortex contains a mechanism which enables memory to span the intervening items in a serial recognition task, or whether the inferior temporal cortex is merely afferent to such recent memory mechanisms, we analysed the activity of single neurons in the inferior temporal visual cortex and the adjacent cortex in the superior temporal sulcus in both delayed match to sample and serial recognition memory tasks. In the serial recognition task, various numbers of stimuli intervened between the first and second presentations of a stimulus. A considerable proportion (64/264 or 26%) of visually responsive inferotemporal neurons showed a different response to the "novel" and "familiar" presentations of a stimulus in the serial recognition memory task, and often a corresponding difference in response between the sample and match presentations of a stimulus in the delayed match to sample task. For the majority of neurons this difference was not sustained across even one intervening stimulus in the serial recognition task, and no neurons bridged more than 2 intervening stimuli. These results show that neurons in the inferior temporal cortex have responses which would be useful for a short term visual memory for stimuli, but would not be useful in recency memory tasks in which more than one stimulus intervenes between the first and second presentations of a stimulus. In this investigation, neurons were recorded both in the cortex on the inferior temporal gyrus (commonly called inferior temporal visual cortex, and consisting of areas TE3, TE2 and TE1 of Seltzer and Pandya 1978), and in the cortex in the adjacent anterior part of the superior temporal sulcus, in which a number of different temporal cortical visual areas have now been described.

Dimensionality and Signal Detection Effects on a Short-Term Memory Task with Mentally Retarded Children

The purpose was to compare a priori and d′ measures using data from Swanson and Watson's (1976) study with 10 mentally retarded children on a serial recognition task. Treatment main effects were similar using both measures. Significant primacy and recency effects were found with d′ measures, however, this was not found in a post hoc analysis of proportion correct scores. The results suggested that future investigations of serial recognition performance with emotionally mentally retarded children use an unbiased index of memory strength.

Nonverbal Visual Short-Term Memory as a Function of Age and Dimensionality in Learning-disabled Children

A serial recognition task was used to compare performance of 2 learning disability age groups with 2- and 3-dimensional representations of nonlabeled 8-point random shapes. Age-related increases in short-term memory (STM) performance for both dimensions were found. No significant differences were found between 2- or 3-dimensional stimuli. Contrary to reports of STM performance with normal children, learning-disabled children showed no primacy effect for the 2-dimensional treatment, and second choices were not consistently correct when the first choice was incorrect, These findings were interpreted according to Flavell's notions of mediational inefficiencies.