Associations are formed among the items in a sequence over the course of learning, but these item-to-item associations are not sufficient to reproduce the order of the sequence (Lashley, 1951). Contemporary theories of serial order tend to omit these associations entirely. The current paper investigates whether item-to-item associations play a…

Serial position functions with marked primacy and recency effects are ubiquitous in episodic memory tasks. The demonstrations reported here explored whether bow-shaped serial position functions would be observed when people ordered exemplars from various categories along a specified dimension. The categories and dimensions were: actors and age;…

The law of prior entry states that attended objects come to consciousness more quickly than unattended ones. This has been well established in spatial cueing paradigms, where two task-relevant stimuli are presented near-simultaneously at two different locations. Here, we suggest that prior entry also plays a pivotal role in temporal attention…

Many accounts of working memory posit specialized storage mechanisms for the maintenance of serial order. We explore an alternative, that maintenance is achieved through temporary activation in the language production architecture. Four experiments examined the extent to which the phonological similarity effect can be explained as a sublexical…