Serial Position and Distance Effects in Visual Working Memory
Barbara Dolenc2013, Studia Psychologica
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Abstract
Numerous studies have identified and explored the factors that affect order information processing in verbal working memory (WM), whereas little is known about order maintenance in visual WM. To gain better insight into the possible mechanisms of representing order in visual WM, we assessed the extent of serial position and item distance effects on visual WM. 20 students performed a visual WM task. They were asked to encode and maintain either the identity or temporal order of four visual stimuli. The results revealed recency and distance effects congruent with previous studies of verbal WM, however, no primacy effect in accuracy results was detected. Distance was revealed to be closely intertwined with recency, making it difficult to estimate their separate effects on order recognition. These results suggest that order coding in visual WM involves the use of a magnitude of codes similar to those employed in number processing and verbal WM.
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