Order recall in verbal short-term memory: the role of semantic networks

In their recent paper, Acheson, MacDonald, and Postle (2011) made an important but controversial suggestion: they hypothesised that a) semantic information has an effect on order information in short-term memory (STM) and b) that order recall in STM is based on the level of activation of items within the relevant lexico-semantic long-term memory (LTM) network. However, verbal STM research typically has led to the conclusion that factors such as semantic category have a large effect on the number of correctly recalled items and little or no impact on order recall (Poirier & Saint-Aubin, 1995; Tse, 2009; Saint-Aubin, Ouellette, & Poirier, 2005). Moreover most formal models of short-term order memory currently suggest a separate mechanism for order coding – that is one that is separate from item representation and not associated with long-term memory lexico-semantic networks. Both of the studies reported here tested the predictions we derived from Acheson et al. The findings show that as predicted, manipulations aiming to affect the activation of item representations significantly impacted order memory