Presents a postscript to the current authors' comment on the original article, "Short-term memory for serial order: A recurrent neural network model," by M. M. Botvinick and D. C. Plaut. In their commentary, the current authors demonstrated that Botvinick and Plaut's (2006) model of immediate serial recall catastrophically fails when familiar…

Background: The Hebb effect is a form of repetition-driven long-term learning that is thought to provide an analogue for the processes involved in new word learning. Other evidence suggests that verbal short-term memory also constrains now vocabulary acquisition, but if the Hebb effect is independent of short-term memory, then it may be possible…

The capacity to remember sequences is critical to many behaviors, such as navigation and communication. Adult humans readily recall the serial order of auditory items, and this ability is commonly understood to support, in part, the speech processing for language comprehension. Theories of short-term serial recall posit either use of absolute…

According to temporal distinctiveness models, items that are temporally isolated from their neighbors during list presentation are more distinct and thus should be recalled better. Contrary to that expectation of distinctiveness views, much recent evidence has shown that forward short-term serial recall is unaffected by temporal isolation. We…

Participants searched a visual display for a target among distractors. Each of 3 experiments tested a condition proposed to require attention and for which certain models propose a serial search. Serial versus parallel processing was tested by examining effects on response time means and cumulative distribution functions. In 2 conditions, the…

It is commonly assumed that orthographical lexical access in visual word recognition takes place in parallel, with all letters activated at the same time. In contrast, in the SERIOL model of letter-position encoding, letters fire sequentially (Whitney, 2001). I present further support for such seriality on several fronts. (1) The reasons that led…

This study investigated the role of auditory selective attention capacities as a possible mediator of the well-established association between verbal short-term memory (STM) and vocabulary development. A total of 47 6- and 7-year-olds were administered verbal immediate serial recall and auditory attention tasks. Both task types probed processing…

Previous studies that have found attentional capture effects for stimuli of motivational significance do not directly measure initial attentional deployment, leaving it unclear to what extent these items produce attentional capture. Visual prior entry, as measured by temporal order judgments (TOJs), rests on the premise that allocated attention…

People are especially efficient in processing certain visual stimuli such as human faces or good configurations. It has been suggested that topology and geometry play important roles in configural perception. Visual search is one area in which configurality seems to matter. When either of 2 target features leads to a correct response and the…

Size and scale are crosscutting ideas integral to scientific understanding. However, research shows that students have little understanding of the size of objects, particularly objects too small to see with the unaided eye. Using a cross-sectional study with 101 middle-school through undergraduate students, a teaching experiment with 24 middle…

The grouping of list items is known to improve serial memory accuracy and constrain the nature of temporal errors. A recent study (M. T. Maybery, F. B. R. Parmentier, & D. M. Jones, 2002) showed that grouping results in a temporal organization of the participants' responses that mimics the list structure but not the timing of its presentation.…

The remarkable successes of the physical sciences have been built on highly general quantitative laws, which serve as the basis for understanding an enormous variety of specific physical systems. How far is it possible to construct universal principles in the cognitive sciences, in terms of which specific aspects of perception, memory, or decision…

Apraxia of Speech (AOS) is an impairment of motor programming. However, the exact nature of this deficit remains unclear. The present study examined motor programming in AOS in the context of a recent two-stage model [Klapp, S. T. (1995). Motor response programming during simple and choice reaction time: The role of practice. "Journal of…

The primacy model is presented as a new model of serial recall. This model stores order information by means of the assumption that the strength of activation of successive list items decreases across list position to form a primary gradient. The model produces accurate simulation of the effects of word length, list length, and phonological…

Discusses the cognitive processes involved in constructing linear orderings from pairwise relationships of information items. Examines the effects that sentence types used in presenting information have on these processes, and tests two models designed to clarify the acquisition of spatial knowledge and the processing of locative and comparative…