Storage and retrieval of serial‐order information

Abstract

In this paper I will first review some seminal work by Conrad on the storage and retrieval of serial‐order information which is still very relevant today. Then I will discuss the TODAM (theory of distributed associative memory) approach to serial‐order effects. I will compare the three TODAM serial‐order models (the chaining model, the chunking model and the power‐set model; Murdock, 1995) but concentrate on the power set model. Its original problems can be solved, but a revised and augmented version has some new problems. This paper is more of a progress report than a finished product, so the reader should be prepared to follow the twists and turns of the argument.

Notes

Correspondence should be addressed to Bennet Murdock, Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON M5S 3G3, Canada. Email: [email protected]

This work was supported by Grant APA 146 from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. I thank Bruce Oddson for many helpful suggestions during the preparation of this paper.

A fuller discussion of some of these points may be found elsewhere (Neath & Surprenant, 2003).

Retrieval may require five bins (Murdock, 1995).

This example assumes that, at the start of the list, only the first item is stored in the memory vector (M). This leaves open the question of how the start vector is associated with the first item, and this will be discussed shortly.

At least for means.

Why you get the recency effect in precued studies is another matter.

This does not necessarily mean that no prior item would ever be recalled. If the variance were large enough that could happen.