People produce long sequences such as speech and music with incremental planning: mental preparation of a subset of sequence events. The authors model in music performance the sequence events that can be retrieved and prepared during production. Events are encoded in terms of their serial order and timing relative to other events in a planning increment, a contextually determined distribution of event activations. Planning is facilitated by events ’ metrical similarity and serial/temporal proximity and by developmental changes in short-term memory. The model’s predictions of larger planning increments as production rate decreases and as producers ’ age–experience increases are confirmed in serial-ordering errors produced by adults and children. Incremental planning is considered as a general retrieval constraint in serially ordered behaviors. When people produce long, complex sequences such as speech and music, they must plan what event to produce next (the serialorder problem) and when to produce it (the timing problem). Bernstein (1967) and Lashley (1951) both pointed to music as a quintessential example of serial-ordering abilities because of its complexity, length, and temporal properties. Although musical

Associations in episodic memory are formed between items presented close together in time. The temporal context model (TCM) hypothesizes that this contiguity effect is a consequence of shared temporal contexts rather than temporal proximity per se. Using double function lists of paired associates, which include chains of pairs (e.g. A-B, B-C), we examined associations between items that were not presented close together in time but were presented in similar temporal contexts. For instance A and C do not appear together, but both occur in the context of B. Although within-pair associations (e.g. A-B) were asymmetric, across-pair associations (e.g. A-C) showed no evidence for asymmetry. We attempted to describe these transitive associations using two models. One was a heteroassociative model in which the A-C associations resulted from mediated chaining as a result of “stepping through ” the links in the chain. Although this heteroassociative model and TCM make identical predictions regarding simple contiguity effects, the heteroassociative model had great difficulty accounting for the form of transitive associations between items. TCM provided an excellent fit to the data. These data raise the surprising possiblity that episodic contiguity effects do not reflect direct associations between items but rather a process of binding, encoding and retrieval of a gradually-changing

Draft: Do not quote Association and context constitute two of the central ideas in the history of episodic memory research. Following a brief discussion of the history of these ideas, we review data that demonstrate the complementary roles of temporal contiguity and semantic relatedness in determining the order in which subjects recall lists of items and the timing of their successive recalls. These analyses reveal that temporal contiguity effects persist over very long time scales, a result that challenges traditional psychological and neuroscientific models of association. The form of the temporal contiguity effect is conserved across all of the major recall tasks and even appears in item recognition when subjects respond with high confidence. The nearuniversal form of the contiguity effect and its appearance at diverse time scales is shown to place tight constraints on the major theories of association. [Y]ou are wrong to say that we cannot move about in Time. For instance, if I am recalling an incident very vividly I go back to the instant of its occurrence: I become absent-minded, as you say. I jump back for a moment. H. G. Wells, The Time Machine, 1898 In the above quote from Wells ’ classic science-fiction novel, the protagonist compares his actual travels through time to the mental time travel one experiences through the act of

According to some theories of recognition memory (e.g., Dennis and Humphreys, 2001), the number of different contexts in which words appear determines how memorable individual occurences of words will be: A word that occurs in a small number different contexts should be better recognized than a word that appears in a larger number of different contexts. To empirically test this prediction, a normative measure is developed, which is referred to here as context variability, that estimates the number of different contexts in which words appear in everyday life. The present findings confirm the prediction that words low in context variability are better recognized (on average) than words that are high in context variability.

this memory item are labeled PREVIOUS and NEXT. These properties take the form of uniquely generated symbols that are used to maintain order information in the form of a chain (in Table 4.1, these symbols are simply unique integers). The PREVIOUS property of one item is identical to the NEXT tag of the item that immediately preceded it, allowing order information to be stored as a chain of bi-directional references, and enabling the items immediately before or immediately after a given item to be located with ease

Recurrent connections combined with the appropriate dynamics enable oscillatory neural networks to produce rhythmic activity patterns. Such oscillatory activity can represent multiple stored patterns simultaneously, rather than the single pattern of a fixed-point network. However, retrieving these stored patterns in the same order as they were seen has proven challenging. In this paper we modify a recently developed simple oscillatory memory capable of storing temporal sequences so that it will now retrieve remembered items in the same order presented. This was achieved through the use of a temporally asymmetric weight matrix. The network is still capable of matching the recall performance of human subjects, reproducing the recency effect they exhibit in working memory tasks and displaying similar position-specific recall rates. We conclude that augmenting simple oscillatory neural network models with temporally asymmetric synaptic connections substantially improves their ability to match human short term memory properties.

Two experiments tested 1 aspect of L. Hasher and R. T. Zacks's (1988) reduced inhibition hypothesis, namely, that old age impairs the ability to suppress information in working memory that is no longer relevant. In Experiment 1, young and older adults were asked to recall lists of letters in the correct order. Half of the lists contained repeated items while half were control lists. Recall of nonadjacent repeated items was worse than that of control items. This Ranschburg effect was larger (i.e., greater response suppression) in older than in young adults. In Experiment 2, young and older adults were required either to recall the list or to report if there was a repeated item. Repetition detection was high and similar in the 2 age groups. When age differences in overall performance were taken into account, there was evidence of increased repetition inhibition with age in both experiments. Thus, contrary to the general reduced inhibition hypothesis, the specific process of response suppression during serial recall is not reduced by aging. In recent years, there has been considerable interest in inhibitory processes in cognition (see Dempster, 1992; Dempster & Brainerd, 1995, for reviews) and, in particular, in their development during childhood (e.g., Harnishfeger, 1995) and decline with normal

This paper describes a new computational model of phonological production, Holographic Reduced Representations for Oscillator Recall, or HORROR. HORROR’s architecture accounts for phonological speech error patterns by combining the hierarchical oscillating context signal of the OSCAR serial-order model (Vousden, Brown, and Harley 2000; Brown, Preece, and Hulme 2000) with a holographic associative memory (Plate 1995). The resulting model is novel in a number of ways. Most importantly, all of the noise needed to generate errors is intrinsic to the system, instead of being generated by an external process. The model features fully-distributed hierarchical phoneme representations and a single distributed associative memory. Using fewer parameters and a more parsimonious design than OS-CAR, HORROR accounts for error type proportions, the syllable-position constraint, and other constraints seen in the human speech error data.

This paper concerns the perception of syllable structure and the way this process allows us to form structural representations of syllables in memory. It is argued that bottom-up processes are required for the formation of phonological representations of nonwords in shmt-term memory, and of words in early childhood, where top-down knowledge concerning syllable structure cannot be assumed. A new model is presented using signal processing techniques to show that representations of syllable structure can be developed fom acoustic information, without top-down input. The model is motivated by psycholinguistic data and theory, expressed at the level of a putative neural mechanism, and supported by recent neurophysiological and brain imaging data. It describes syllable structure not in terms of events (e.g., syllable boundaries) or phonological frames with discrete slots, but in terms of a continuously varying measure of syllable position: syllabic phase. The validity of the model is demonstrated using a corpus of spoken sentences fi'om the TIMIT database. Implications of the model for theories ofphonological memory and developmental dyslexia are discussed. On the basis of recent functional imaging and neurophysiological studies, the neural basis for the proposed mechanism is hypothesized to be in the posterior Superior Temporal Sulcus

Short-term memory for serial order, like other domains of memory, is subject to constructive effects. In particular, background knowledge concerning regularities in sequential structure can affect serial recall.