Distinctiveness in Serial Memory for Spatial Information

Overview

Journal Mem Cognit

Specialty Psychology

Date 2009 Dec 8

PMID 19966241

Citations 7

Authors

Katherine Guerard

Ian Neath

Aimee M Surprenant

Sebastien Tremblay

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Several studies have shown that recall performance depends on the extent to which an item differs from other items in a sequence (the distinctiveness effect; see, e.g., Kelley & Nairne, 2001). Distinctiveness effects, however, have been demonstrated mainly in the verbal domain. The present study extends distinctiveness effects to the spatial domain. In two experiments, participants recalled the order in which series of spatially located dots had been presented. Item discriminability was varied within the sequence by manipulating the duration of the interval inserted between the presentation of the dots (Experiment 1) and the perceptual characteristics of the stimuli (Experiment 2). The results showed that these manipulations in the spatial domain produce distinctiveness effects similar to those observed with verbal material (see, e.g., Neath & Crowder, 1990) and suggest that distinctiveness models of memory should take into account the processing of spatial information.

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