Commentary: Coding of serial order in verbal, visual and spatial working memory

Frontiers in Psychology

Elger Abrahamse¹ 

关键词: working memory;    serial order;    spatial coding;    position markers;    mental whiteboard hypothesis;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02330

学科分类：心理学（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

The ordinal position effect refers to the observation that the later an item is positioned within a sequence maintained in working memory (WM), the larger is the rightward bias that it generates upon later retrieval during diagnostic tasks intended to capture this bias (van Dijck and Fias, 2011; van Dijck et al., 2013; Guida et al., 2016, 2018b). Recently, Ginsburg et al. (2017) showed how this effect replicates: for verbal but not spatial sequences (Experiments 1–3); for both abstract and concrete stimuli whenever they are verbalized (Experiment 4); for conditions with and without articulatory suppression (Experiment 5); and finally for pseudo-words whenever they are semantically encoded (Experiment 6). Since lack of semantic processing is a common denominator across their conditions with absent ordinal position effects, Ginsburg et al. concluded that item sequences are spatially maintained in WM only “if the items memorized in WM are semantically coded by the participants” (p. 647). In this commentary we outline our concern with this conclusion, and specifically with the interpretation of absent ordinal position effects.

【 授权许可】

CC BY