Maintaining Recency despite a Stimulus Suffix

Abstract

Two processes of information retrieval were considered in the context of the logogen model. The aim was to establish whether information about the final items of an auditory short-term memory list is held exclusively in precategorical acoustic storage at presentation or whether these items are automatically registered in a cognitive store as well. Error data for a final heterogeneous item in alphanumeric lists showed significantly better recall, despite the addition of a stimulus suffix. Although these results demonstrated that coding had proceeded further than a precategorical stage, which maintains only physical features, the possibility remained that the effect was due to a bias in focal attention and selective coding at list presentation. A second experiment increased the difficulty of the retrieval task, and effectively precluded the possibility of a bias in attention. The results confirmed the findings in the first experiment. It was concluded that information about the final item(s) is registered automatically in the cognitive system, and that responses are made available from this source when information about physical features of the item is degraded by a stimulus suffix.