Recent research that assessed spatial judgments about multisensory stimuli suggests that humans integrate multisensory inputs in a statistically optimal manner by weighting each input by its normalized reciprocal variance. Is integration similarly optimal when humans judge the temporal properties of bimodal stimuli? Twenty-four participants…

Recent evidence suggests substantial response-time costs associated with lag-2 repetitions of tasks within explicitly controlled task sequences [Koch, I., Philipp, A. M., Gade, M. (2006). Chunking in task sequences modulates task inhibition. "Psychological Science," 17, 346-350; Schneider, D. W. (2007). Task-set inhibition in chunked task…

The Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test, which requires the free recall of the same list of 15 unrelated words over 5 trials, was administered to 21 high-functioning adolescents and adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and 21 matched typical individuals. The groups showed similar overall levels of free recall, rates of learning over trials and…

Serial-order short-term memory (STM), as opposed to item STM, has been shown to be very consistently associated with lexical learning abilities in cross-sectional study designs. This study investigated longitudinal predictions between serial-order STM and vocabulary development. Tasks maximizing the temporary retention of either serial-order or…

When are the precursors of ordinal numerical knowledge first evident in infancy? Brannon (2002) argued that by 11 months of age, infants possess the ability to appreciate the greater than and less than relations between numerical values but that this ability experiences a sudden onset between 9 and 11 months of age. Here we present 5 experiments…

Three experiments examined the effects of position distinctiveness, item familiarity, and frequency of presentation on serial position functions in a task involving reconstructing the order of a subset of 12 names in a list of 20 names. Three different serial position conditions were compared in which the subset of names occurred in Positions…

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…

A sentence is readily understood and recalled when presented one word at a time using rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) at 10 words/s [Potter, M. C. (1984). Rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP): A method for studying language processing. In D. Kieras & M. Just (Eds.), "New methods in reading comprehension research" (pp. 91-118).…

Whether two-digit numbers are represented holistically (each digit pair processed as one number) or compositionally (each digit pair processed separately as a decade digit and a unit digit) remains unresolved. Two experiments were conducted to examine the distance, magnitude, and SNARC effects in a number-matching task involving two-digit numbers.…

This study presents the first direct comparison of immediate serial recall in semantic dementia (SD) and transcortical sensory aphasia (TSA). Previous studies of the effect of semantic impairment on verbal short-term memory (STM) have led to important theoretical advances. However, different conclusions have been drawn from these two groups. This…

Three experiments with short-term recognition tasks are reported. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants decided whether a probe matched a list item specified by its spatial location. Items presented at study in a different location (intrusion probes) had to be rejected. Serial position curves of positive, new, and intrusion probes over the probed…

Knowledge of sequential relationships enables future events to be anticipated and processed efficiently. Research with the serial reaction time task (SRTT) has shown that sequence learning often occurs implicitly without effort or awareness. Here, the authors report 4 experiments that use a triplet-learning task (TLT) to investigate sequence…

Studies of monolingual speakers have shown a strong association between lexical learning and short-term memory (STM) capacity, especially STM for serial order information. At the same time, studies of bilingual speakers suggest that phonological knowledge is the main factor that drives lexical learning. This study tested these two hypotheses…

Previous research stresses the importance of seriation, classification, and counting abilities that should be assessed in kindergarten, when looking for crucial predictors of mathematical learning disabilities in Grade 1. This study examines (n = 158) two-year-long predictive relationships between children's seriation, classification, procedural…

Using transfer methodology, several possible factors that could have affected the expression of serial position learning were examined with runway-trained rats. A 3-trial series (SNP) --for which S and P refer to series trials when sucrose (S) and plain (P) Noyes pellets were used as a reward, and N refers to a trial without reward -- was the…