Three experiments examined the immediate free recall (IFR) of auditory-verbal and visuospatial materials from single-modality and dual-modality lists. In Experiment 1, we presented participants with between 1 and 16 spoken words, with between 1 and 16 visuospatial dot locations, or with between 1 and 16 words "and" dots with synchronized…

Does retrieval practice produce learning because it is an especially effective way to induce elaborative encoding? Four experiments examined this question. Subjects learned word pairs across alternating study and recall periods, and once an item was recalled it was dropped from further practice, repeatedly studied, or repeatedly retrieved on…

The authors investigated the units of selective attention within working memory. In Experiment 1, a group of participants kept 1 count and 1 location in working memory and updated them repeatedly in random order. Another group of participants were instructed to achieve the same goal by memorizing the verbal and spatial information in an…

Compares the rates of forgetting of five-item sequences of acoustically similar and dissimilar consonants and words in the absence of proactive and retroactive interference in order to test whether within sequence similarity rather than stimulus length would have a greater influence on retention. (Author/RK)

Three experiments contrasted subjects' memory for verbal and figural displays. Data are discussed in terms of a multiple coding model, which is suggested as a more fruitful approach than single-code models such as those proposed by Pylyshyn or Anderson and Bower. (Editor/RK)

Four experiments are reported investigating previous findings that speech perception interferes with concurrent verbal memory but difficult nonverbal perceptual tasks do not, to any great degree. (Editor)

1,242 subjects, in five experiments plus a pilot study, saw a series of slides depicting a single auto-pedestrian accident. These experiments investigate how information supplied after an event influences a witness's memory for that event. Results suggest that information supplied a witness after an event, whether inconsistent or misleading, is…

This series of experiments was designed to evaluate a model of picture and word encoding. The primary assumptions are that both sensory and semantic codes can be activated for both pictures and words but the relative order of access to phonemic information is different for the two types of representation. (Editor/RK)

Why does the rehearsal of information not interfere with a subject's temporal judgments. Offers evidence in favor of one possible interpretation. Taking an analogy from the phenomenon of the localization of sound in a sound-reverberating room, this research suggests a precedence effect in verbal information processing. (Author/RK)

These experiments consider similarities and differences between classifications of pictorial and verbal stimuli in order to investigate whether the kinds of information used differ depending on the stimulus class. Three hypotheses regarding the information used in picture and word classification were evaluated. (Author/RK)

This research attempts to determine whether integration of information occurs when the information is presented partly in the verbal modality and partly in the pictorial modality; in other words, does cross-modality integration occur? (Author/RK)

Comparisons between recall levels following simple acoustic or visual tasks and the simultaneous visual-plus-acoustic task are not based upon equivalent amounts of interference within each modality. This research attempts to test more precisely the relationship between visual and acoustic interference by using a sequential rather than a…

This research tested Paivio's (1971) proposal that pictorial and verbal memory codes interact with space and time. This "interaction hypothesis" states that pictorial memory codes are specialized for spatial structures and verbal memory codes are specialized for temporal structures. Tests this hypothesis by exploring several variations…

Research suggests that we process information by way of two distinct and functionally separate coding systems. Their location, somewhat dependent on cerebral laterality, varies in right- and left-handed persons. Tests this dual coding model. (Editor/RK)

The results of the experiments reported here are in support of the hypothesis that visual and aural presentation lead to different forms of storage and/or retrieval. They are not consistent with models of human memory in which short-term storage is restricted exclusively to an auditory-verbal-linguistic process. (Author)