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…

Single linear virtual timelines have been used effectively with undergraduates and primary school children to convey the chronological ordering of historical items, improving on PowerPoint and paper/textual displays. In the present study, a virtual environment (VE) consisting of three parallel related timelines (world history and the histories of…

In transparent orthographies like German, isolated learning disabilities in either reading or spelling are common and occur as often as a combined reading and spelling disability. However, most issues surrounding the cognitive causes of these isolated or combined literacy difficulties are yet unresolved. Recently, working memory dysfunctions have…

While many behavioural studies on refractory phenomena in lexical/semantic access have focused on the mechanisms involved in the oral production of names, comprehension tasks have been almost exclusively used in neuropsychological studies on brain damaged patients. We report the results of two experiments on healthy participants conducted by means…

Three experiments examined the processes mediating rat serial pattern learning for rule-consistent versus rule-violating pattern elements ("violation elements"). In all three experiments, rats were trained to press retractable levers in a circular array in a specific sequence for brain-stimulation reward (BSR). Experiment 1 examined the role of…

The response-signal speed-accuracy trade-off (SAT) procedure was used to investigate the relationship between measures of working memory capacity and the time course of short-term item recognition. High- and low-span participants studied sequentially presented 6-item lists, immediately followed by a recognition probe. Analyses of composite list…

This study investigated how 4-month-old infants represent sequences: Do they track the statistical relations among specific sequence elements (e.g., AB, BC) or do they encode abstract ordinal positions (i.e., B is second)? Infants were habituated to sequences of 4 moving and sounding elements--3 of the elements varied in their ordinal position…

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…

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…

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…

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.…

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…

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…

Evidence that the abilities to repeat nonwords and to learn language are very closely related to one another has led to widespread interest in the cognitive processes underlying nonword repetition. One suggestion is that nonword repetition is a relatively pure measure of phonological short-term memory closely associated with other measures of…