Abstract
Recent evidence suggests that a common temporal representation underlies memory for serial order of items in a sequence, and the timing of items in a sequence. This stands in contrast to other data suggesting a reliance on only ordinal information in short-term memory tasks. An experiment is reported here in which participants were post cued to perform a comparison between a probe and study list of items irregularly spaced in time, on the basis of order or temporal information. Participants’ performance on the serial recognition task was not affected by the temporal proximity of items, although participants were able to use temporal information to perform a temporal recognition task. Application of a temporal matching model of serial and temporal recognition suggests that although participants were able to remember the timing of items, this memory for timing was unlikely to determine serial recognition performance. The results suggest a dissociation between ordinal and temporal information in short-term memory.
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The experiment reported in this article was run as part of the second author’s undergraduate dissertation. This research was presented at the 4th International Conference on Memory (July 2006) in Sydney, Australia. We thank James Melhorn for recording the stimuli used in the experiments and Fiona Laver, Ian Neath, Simon Dennis, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments.
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Farrell, S., McLaughlin, K. Short-term recognition memory for serial order and timing. Memory & Cognition 35, 1724–1734 (2007). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03193505
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03193505