Maintenance of item and order information in verbal working memory

ABSTRACT

Although verbal recall of item and order information is well-researched in short-term memory paradigms, there is relatively little research concerning item and order recall from working memory. The following study examined whether manipulating the opportunity for attentional refreshing and articulatory rehearsal in a complex span task differently affected the recall of item- and order-specific information of the memoranda. Five experiments varied the opportunity for articulatory rehearsal and attentional refreshing in a complex span task, but the type of recall was manipulated between experiments (item and order, order only, and item only recall). The results showed that impairing attentional refreshing and articulatory rehearsal similarly affected recall regardless of whether the scoring procedure (Experiments 1 and 4) or recall requirements (Experiments 2, 3, and 5) reflected item- or order-specific recall. This implies that both mechanisms sustain the maintenance of item and order information, and suggests that the common cumulative functioning of these two mechanisms to maintain items could be at the root of order maintenance.

KEYWORDS:

• Working memory
• serial recall
• item and order recall
• refreshing
• rehearsal

Acknowledgements

We thank Benoit Perriard for running Experiment 3.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation [grant number 100014_137860] and by a grant from the Agence Nationale de la Recherche [grant number ANR-08-BLAN-045] to Valérie Camos.