During the preschool years, children are simultaneously undergoing a reshaping of their mental number line and becoming increasingly sensitive to the social norms expressed by those around them. In the current study, 4- and 5-year-old American and Israeli children were given a task in which an experimenter laid out chips with numbers (1-5),…

In a single large-scale study, we demonstrate that verbal sequence learning as studied using the classic Hebb repetition effect (Hebb, 1961)--the improvement in the serial recall of a repeating sequence compared to nonrepeated sequences--is resilient to both wide and irregular spacing between sequence repetitions. Learning of a repeated sequence…

Executing actions in a specific order is a critical component of many action sequences that children must acquire, the majority of which are learned through observation and imitation of others. Although a wealth of evidence indicates that children can process and represent temporal order in memory, relatively little is known about the development…

Time and space represent two key aspects of episodic memories, forming the spatiotemporal context of events in a sequence. Little is known, however, about how temporal information, such as the duration and the order of particular events, are encoded into memory, and if it matters whether the memory representation is based on recollection or…

Reconstructing memory for sequences is a complex process, likely involving multiple sources of information. In 3 experiments, we examined the source(s) of information that might underlie the ability to accurately place an event within a temporal context. The task was to estimate, after studying each list, the temporal position of a single test…

Learners make a number of decisions when attempting to study efficiently: they must choose which information to study, for how long to study it, and whether to restudy it later. The current experiments examine whether documented impairments to self-regulated learning when studying information sequentially, as opposed to simultaneously, extend to…

Remembering the order of a sequence of events is a fundamental feature of episodic memory. Indeed, a number of formal models represent temporal context as part of the memory system, and memory for order has been researched extensively. Yet, the nature of the code(s) underlying sequence memory is still relatively unknown. Across 4 experiments that…

The goal of the present study was to demonstrate that declarative and non-declarative knowledge acquired in an incidental sequence learning task contributes differentially to memory retrieval and leads to dissociable ERP signatures in a recognition memory task. For this purpose, participants performed a sequence learning task and were classified…

The expression of expert motor skills typically involves learning to perform a precisely timed sequence of movements. Research examining incidental sequence learning has relied on a perceptually cued task that gives participants exposure to repeating motor sequences but does not require timing of responses for accuracy. In the 1st experiment, a…

In a serial recall task, the "Hebb repetition effect" occurs when recall performance improves for a sequence repeated throughout the experimental session. This phenomenon has been replicated many times. Nevertheless, such cumulative learning seldom leads to perfect recall of the whole sequence, and errors persist. Here the authors report…

Contrasts sequential and relational processing manipulations of passages with manipulations which focus on individual lexical items and the propositions in which they are embedded. Finds recall to be superior when readers use sequential and relational processing during performance of individual item-specific lexical processing. (RS)

Research supported in part by grants from the Social Rehabilitation Services Administration (1484-S) and NICHHD (02026).

Purpose of experiment was to provide evidence for the role of contextual associations in memory for serial position because position judgments are affected by factors other than those correlated by time. (DS)

Memory span of symbol strings decreased as string length or number of different symbols composing the strings increased. Recall of digit strings was a function of string length only. (Author)

This study was designed to examine relationships between three variables of analysis/integration skill in visual perception and the tendency to retain differentiated memories of sequential visual images in a sample of 206 university undergraduates. Correlation techniques and factor analysis were used to analyze relationships between the perceptual…