Serial position and clustering effects in a chimpanzee’s “flee recall”

Buchanan, James; Gill, Timothy V.; Braggio, John T.

doi:10.3758/bf03202360

Cited by 34 publications

(33 citation statements)

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“…A variety of contingencies have been used in these nonspatial memory experimentssometimes matching (analogous to spatial stay), sometimes nonmatching (like spatial shift), and sometimes neither, with the presentation instead of a single probe picture that either has or has not been included in the list, the subject being required to make one of two responses signifying "old" and "new," respectively. (Buchanan, Gill, & Braggio, 1981, observed both primacy and recency in a single chimpanzee, but that study is not rel-evant here. The animal was sophisticated in an artificial language, "Yerkish," and the paradigm was free recallLe., reproduction oflists ofYerkish symbols.…”

Section: Determinants Of Primacy and Recency In Spatial And Nonspatiamentioning

confidence: 82%

Primacy, recency, and the variability of data in studies of animals’ working memory

Gaffan

1992

Animal Learning & Behavior

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The performance measures in many experiments on animal memory are expected to have an underlying binomial distribution, with additional variance contributed, for example, by betweensubject differences. This paper examines whether the data from published studies of serial position effects (primacy and recency) in animals' working memory conform to that expectation. In most cases, the variance, when it can be estimated, is consistent with those statistical assumptions, but in certain studies, it is significantly smaller than expected. This is usually a sign of faulty procedure or analysis, and possible causes are discussed. The conclusion is that much of the evidence for primacy in animals. is unsatisfactory, on statistical or other methodological grounds. The analytic approach outlined here might usefully be applied to detect potential problems with other experiments of a similar type, especially when manually operated apparatus is employed, and to improve their statistical power.In this paper, I describe a simple statistical approach and apply it to studies of serial position effects in animals' working memory. I therefore review and reevaluate previous investigations of serial position effects, as well as discuss how the statistical principles could be more widely exploited.In many experiments, animals have been required to remember sequences (lists) of items, either spatial (e. g. , arms of a radial maze) or nonspatial (e.g., objects, pictures, patterns). I concentrate here on working memory paradigms, in which different lists are presented on different trials and the animals' memory for the most recent list is assessed. It has been claimed that animals' performance under these conditions often resembles that of people in analogous tests of recall or recognition of items from lists of words or pictures (Wright & Watkins, 1987). In particular, animals are said to show, under appropriate conditions, both recency (superior memory for items nearer the end of the list) and primacy (better memory for items early in the list, rather than in the middle). (See the references below.)As Hitch (1983Hitch ( , 1985 has commented, primacy and recency have rather different status. Recency effects in working memory are readily obtained from both animal and human subjects, with whatever type of material is to be remembered, and Hitch suggests that they reflect similar processes (simple temporal decay, retroactive interference) in all of the species that have been tested. Consistent with the principle of temporal decay is the finding that items from the end of a list lose their advantage I thank D. Gaffan, P. T. Smith, V. M. LoLordo, and anonymous reviewers for helpful contributions to this paper. Correspondence should be sent to

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Section: Determinants Of Primacy and Recency In Spatial And Nonspatiamentioning

confidence: 82%

Primacy, recency, and the variability of data in studies of animals’ working memory

Gaffan

1992

Animal Learning & Behavior

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“…A similar division for animals is encouraged by several pieces of evidence. The first is the U-shaped serial position functions for apes (Buchanan, Gill, & Braggio, 1981), monkeys (Sands & Wright, 1980a, 1980bRoberts & Kraemer, 1981;Wright et al, 1984;Wright et al, 1985), pigeons Wright et al, 1985), and rats (Bolhuis & van Kampen, 1988;Kesner & Novak, 1982) in list memory tasks. The second is the selective removal of the primacy effect by hippocampal lesions (Kesner, 1985;Kesner & Novak, 1982).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interstimulus interval and viewing time effects in monkey list memory

Cook

Wright

Sands

1991

Animal Learning & Behavior

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Two rhesus monkeys were tested in 6-and Iü-item list memory tasks for performance changes as a function ofthe exposure duration ofthe list stimuli and the interstimulus interval (lSI) between successive list stimuli. Accuracy increased with longer item exposure duration and tended to decrease with longer ISI duration. Humans, by contrast, typically show increases in accuracy with ISI, a result taken as evidence of rehearsal. The decrease in accuracy for monkeys suggests that they were not using rehearsal processes in these list memory experiments. Further tests in which choice accuracy with predictahle ISls was compared with choice accuracy with unpredictahle ISls also yielded no evidence of rehearsal by the monkeys. This apparent absence of rehearsal mechanisms in monkeys, in situations also shown to support human rehearsal, is discussed as a potential difference in the visual working memory processes of the two species.Humans regularly engage in rehearsal. Indeed it is difficult to imagine a day going by without our rehearsing something, whether it be telephone numbers, addresses, shopping lists, or names of new acquaintances. Although rehearsal often involves language, this apparently is not a necessary requirement; rehearsal can occur with pictorial stimuli in humans (Watkins, Peynircioglu, & Brems, 1984). In this article, rehearsal will be considered as a subject-controlled, memory-based repetition of to-be-remembered material (cf. Johnson, 1980;Watkins & Peynircioglu, 1982). This relatively broad view of rehearsal includes both the overt and covert rehearsal of either visual or verbal materials. When considered thus, rehearsal does not depend on language, and this opens up the possibility that other animals may also have rehearsal-like processes. Procedures involving our human capabilities for language and speech have been valuable and frequently used in the study of rehearsal (see, e.g., Dark & Loftus, 1976;Rundus, 1971;Rundus & Atkinson, 1970; Modigliani & Hedges, 1987), but obviously they cannot be used in examining this question in other animals.During the past decade, the interstirnulus-interval (181) or blank-time procedure has been developed as a promising means of studying animal rehearsal. Rehearsal in humans is identified in this procedure through the increased accuracy that is observed when the ISls between the iterns of a to-be-remembered list or sequence are lengthened. 153For example, Intraub (1980) presented subjects with sequences of 16 pictures at different ISls and then tested item recognition. Subjects presented with pictures for l l O msec and no ISI performed at only 59 % accuracy, but as the ISI was lengthened to 385 msec, 620 msec, 1,390 msec, and finally 4,890 msec, performance increased to 71 %, 78 %, 91 %, and 92 %, respectively. 1 Performance in the 4,89O-msec ISI condition (viewing time, 110 msec) was as accurate as it was when each item was visible for 5 sec. This increase in accuracy with langer ISls will be referred to as the ISI effect in the present article.The ISI effect...

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“…Animals, I think it would be fair to say, would be much less likely than humans to engage in active, willful rehearsal of list items. Animals for which serial position primacy effects have been shown include apes (Buchanan, Gill, & Braggio, 1981), rhesus monkeys (Castro, 1995(Castro, ,1997Castro & Larsen, 1992;Sands & Wright 1980a, 1980bWright, 1998, in press-a;Wright, Santiago, & Sands, 1984;Wright et aI., 1985), squirrel monkeys (Roberts & Kraemer, 1981), capuchin monkeys (Wright, in press-b), rats (Bolhuis & van Kampen, 1988;Harper, McLean, & DalrympleAlford, 1993;Kesner & Novak, 1982;Reed, Croft, & Yeomans, 1996), and pigeons Wright et aI., 1985). Supporters of the modal model could, of course, argue that animals could actively rehearse the items even without the benefits ofianguage for coding and strategic processing.…”

Section: Passive Memory Processes and The Primacy Effectmentioning

confidence: 99%

Auditory and visual serial position functions obey different laws

Wright¹

1998

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review

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Rhesus monkeys were tested in serial probe recognition tasks with either travel slide pictures or natural sounds. Tests with four-item lists produced serial position functions that were essentially opposite in shape for the two modalities and changed in opposite ways with retention interval. For visual memory, the primacy effect grew and the recency effect dissipated with retention interval. Capuchin monkeys, humans, and pigeons showed similar results. For auditory memory with rhesus monkeys, the recency effect grew and the primacy effect dissipated with retention interval. These results taken together, along with results from rehearsal tests of monkeys and humans, implicate two passive memory processes with different time courses. Interference among items within auditory lists was manipulated by varying the time between items and categories of items. Interference across lists was manipulated by varying the item pool size and, hence, item repetitions. Changes in the auditory serial position functions indicated that proactive and retroactive interference may have been instrumental in these dynamically changing serial position functions. Implications for theories and models of memory are discussed.The focus of this article is on visual and auditory list memory experiments with rhesus monkeys that my collaborators and I have conducted over the past 20 years. It took us several years to develop visual list memory procedures in which monkeys would perform at a high level of accuracy. Even more years were spent developing adequate auditory list memory procedures. Considerable development was required before the monkeys learned even the basic rudiments of the auditory task. Experiments from both tasks revealed serial position functions that changed in an orderly fashion across a range of retention intervals. The shapes were, however, different and essentially opposite for the two modalities. These results and others may be revealing about some of the basic mechanisms of short-term recognition memory in monkeys. Some aspects may be relevant for human memory. Similar visual memory findings have been shown for humans as well as rhesus monkeys, capuchin monkeys, and pigeons. RATIONALE FOR TESTING MONKEY LIST MEMORYList memory is perhaps best characterized by the serial position function. Memory is typically found to be best for the first items of a list (primacy effect) and the last items of a list (recency effect) and poorest in the middle. This U-shape This research was partially supported by PHS Grants MH-35202, MH-54167, and DA-l07l5. The author gratefully acknowledges the careful assistance of Jackie Rivera and the help and encouragement on the manuscript from Roddy Roediger, Endel Tulving, Michael Watkins, and an unidentified reviewer. Reprints may be obtained from the author at

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Serial position and clustering effects in a chimpanzee’s “flee recall”

Cited by 34 publications

References 31 publications

Primacy, recency, and the variability of data in studies of animals’ working memory

Primacy, recency, and the variability of data in studies of animals’ working memory

Interstimulus interval and viewing time effects in monkey list memory

Auditory and visual serial position functions obey different laws

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