Long-term memory knowledge is considered to impact short-term maintenance of item information in working memory, as opposed to short-term maintenance of serial order information. Evidence supporting an impact of semantic knowledge on serial order maintenance remains weak. In the present study, we demonstrate that semantic knowledge can impact the…

Previous work regarding a counterintuitive benefit of increasing distractors on episodic long-term memory (LTM) has suggested that retrieval of memoranda in working memory (WM) after attention has been distracted may confer benefits to episodic LTM. The current study investigated 2 conceptions of how this may occur: either as an attentional…

Immediate serial recall of verbal material is highly sensitive to impairment attributable to phonological similarity. Although this has traditionally been interpreted as a within-sequence similarity effect, Engle (2007) proposed an interpretation based on interference from prior sequences, a phenomenon analogous to that found in the Peterson…

When participants are asked to recall a short list of words in any order that they like, they tend to initiate recall with the first list item and proceed in forward order, even when this is not a task requirement. The current research examined whether this tendency might be influenced by varying the number of items that are to be recalled. In 3…

We examined the contribution of the phonological loop to immediate free recall (IFR) and immediate serial recall (ISR) of lists of between one and 15 words. Following Baddeley (1986, 2000, 2007, 2012), we assumed that visual words could be recoded into the phonological store when presented silently but that recoding would be prevented by…