Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

Neurologically intact adults perseverate in immediate serial recall, intruding items from a previous trial into the current response. We applied the electroencephalogram/event-related-potential subsequent-memory paradigm to immediate serial recall to investigate the causes of these errors. In line with previous studies using this paradigm, results revealed that words that were correctly recalled elicited a greater frontal positivity during encoding when compared with words that were either perseverated over or not produced for some other reason. More surprisingly, differences were also found at encoding between the words perseverated into the subsequent response and words that were not perseverated. These findings support a theory stating that abnormalities in both how the current target and the previous trial are processed can contribute to perseveration errors. These results inform existing theories of immediate serial recall and theories of the control of irrelevant information.

Keywords

short-term memory evoked potentials false memory cognitive neuroscience

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Anderson

M. C.

(2005). The role of inhibitory control in forgetting unwanted memories: A consideration of three methods. In Ohta

MacLeod

Uttl

(Eds.), Dynamic cognitive processes (pp. 159–190). Tokyo, Japan: Springer-Verlag.

Azizian

Polich

(2007). Evidence for attentional gradient in the serial position memory curve from event-related potentials. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 19, 2071–2081.

Baddeley

A. D.

Hitch

(1974). Working memory. In Bower

G. H.

(Ed.), The psychology of learning and motivation: Advances in research and theory (Vol. 8; pp. 47–90). New York, NY: Academic Press.

Botvinick

Plaut

D. C.

(2006). Short-term memory for serial order: A recurrent neural network model. Psychological Review, 113, 201–233.

Burgess

Hitch

G. J.

(1999). Memory for serial order: A network model of the phonological loop and its timing. Psychological Review, 106, 551–581.

Chatrian

G. E.

Lettich

Nelson

P. L

. (1988). Modified nomenclature for the “10%” electrode system. Journal of Clinical Neurophysiology, 5, 183–186.

Cohen

Dehaene

(1998). Competition between past and present: Assessment and interpretation of verbal perseveration. Brain, 121, 1641–1659.

Conrad

(1960). Serial order intrusions in immediate memory. British Journal of Psychology, 51, 45–48.

Diamond

Cruttenden

Neiderman

(1994). AB with multiple wells: 1. Why are multiple wells sometimes easier than two wells? 2. Memory or memory + inhibition? Developmental Psychology, 30, 192–205.

10.

Dillon

R. F.

Thomas

(1975). The role of response confusion in proactive interference. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 14, 603–615.

11.

Douglas

R. J.

(1967). The hippocampus and behavior. Psychological Bulletin, 67, 416–442.

12.

Estes

W. K.

(1991). On types of item coding and sources of recall in short-term memory. In Hockley

W. E.

Lewandowsky

(Eds.), Relating theory and data: In honor of Bennet B. Murdock (pp. 155–173). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

13.

Fischer-Baum

Rapp

(2012). Underlying cause(s) of letter perseveration errors. Neuropsychologia, 50, 305–318.

14.

Francis

Kucera

(1982). Frequency analysis of English usage. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin.

15.

Friedman

Johnson

(2000). Event-related potential (ERP) studies of memory encoding and retrieval: A selective review. Microscopy Research & Technique, 51, 6–28.

16.

Friedman

Trott

(2000). An event-related potential study of encoding in young and older adults. Neuropsychologia, 38, 542–557.

17.

Gonsalves

Paller

K. A.

(2000). Neural events that underlie remembering something that never happened. Nature Neuroscience, 3, 1316–1321.

18.

Hamilton

A. C.

Martin

R. C.

(2007). Proactive interference in a semantic short-term memory deficit: Role of semantic and phonological relatedness. Cortex, 43, 112–123.

19.

Hauser

M. D.

(1999). Perseveration, inhibition, and the prefrontal cortex: A new look? Current Opinions in Neurobiology, 9, 214–222.

20.

Henson

R. N.

(1998). Short-term memory for serial order: The start-end model. Cognitive Psychology, 36, 73–137.

21.

Henson

R. N.

(1999). Positional information in short-term memory: Relative or absolute? Memory & Cognition, 27, 915–927.

22.

Konkel

Cohen

N. J.

(2009). Relational memory and the hippocampus: Representations and methods. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 3, 166–174.

23.

MacKay

D. G.

James

L. E.

(2002). Aging, retrograde amnesia, and the binding problem for phonology and orthography: A longitudinal study of “hippocampal amnesic” H.M. Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition, 9, 298–333.

24.

Mangels

J. A.

Picton

T. W.

Craik

F. I.

(2001). Attention and successful episodic encoding: An event-related potential study. Cognitive Brain Research, 11, 77–95.

25.

Martin

Dell

G. S.

(2007). Common mechanisms underlying perseverative and non-perseverative sound and word substitutions. Aphasiology, 21, 1002–1017.

26.

Moses

M. S.

Nickels

L. A.

Sheard

(2004). Disentangling the web: Neologistic perseverative errors in jargon aphasia. Neurocase, 10, 452–461.

27.

Moses

M. S.

Sheard

Nickels

L. A.

(2007). Insights into recurrent perseveration errors in aphasia: A case series approach. Aphasiology, 21, 975–1001.

28.

Nairne

J. S.

(2002). Remembering over the short-term: The case against the standard model. Annual Review of Psychology, 53, 53–81.

29.

Page

M. P. A.

Norris

(1998). The primacy model: A new model of immediate serial recall. Psychological Review, 105, 761–781.

30.

Paller

K. A.

McCarthy

Wood

C. C.

(1988). ERPs predictive of subsequent recall and recognition performance. Biological Psychology, 26, 269–276.

31.

Sahakyan

Kelley

C. M.

(2002). A contextual change account of the directed forgetting effect. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 28, 1064–1072.

32.

Smith

L. B.

Thelen

Titzer

McLin

(1999). Knowing in the context of acting: The task dynamics of the A-not-B error. Psychological Review, 106, 235–260.

33.

van Petten

Kutas

Kluender

Mitchiner

McIsaac

. (1991). Fractionating the word repetition effect with event-related potentials. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 3, 131–150.

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.00 MB

0.17 MB