Pauses as recoding points in letter series
01 Mar 1970-Journal of Experimental Psychology (American Psychological Association)-Vol. 83, pp 421-430
TL;DR: In this paper, it was hypothesized that temporal pauses in letter series are the major places at which receding occurs, either in terms of a pronunciation code (e.g., VAF) or a meaningful code, and three immediate recall experiments confirmed this expectation, comparing optimal pausing with several nonoptimal ways of presenting the sequences.
Abstract: It was hypothesized that temporal pauses in letter series are the major places at which receding occurs, either in terms of a pronunciation code (e.g., VAF) or a meaningful code (e.g., IBM). If pauses determine the units on which receding is attempted, then there will be an optimal and several nonoptimal ways to locate pauses in a given series of codable trigrams. Three immediate recall experiments confirmed this expectation, comparing optimal pausing with several nonoptimal ways of presenting the sequences. Analyses of transition error probabilities supported the view that pauses determine S's recall units, that recall is superior when a pause-bound group is recodable, and that subjectively coded groups are detectable even when no pauses occur in the series.
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Cites background from "Pauses as recoding points in letter..."
...It clearly involves the process of chunking subsequences of a repeated list (e.g., Bower & Springston, 1970; Martin, 1974)....
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TL;DR: In this article, the authors examined ten possible sources of individual and developmental differences in memory span, including rehearsal, grouping, chunking, retrieval strategies, item identification, item ordering, capacity, susceptibility to interference, search rate, and the ouput buffer.
Abstract: Ten possible sources of individual and developmental differences in memory span—rehearsal, grouping, chunking, retrieval strategies, item identification, item ordering, capacity, susceptibility to interference, search rate, and the ouput buffer—arc examined, drawing on existing research, Considerable evidence suggests that the speed with which presented items can be identified is a major source of both individual and developmental differences in span, By contrast, there is no conclusive evidence that any of the other possibilities examined, including those traditionally associated with span differences (rehearsal, grouping, chunking, and overall information-processing capacity) contributes to variations in span. Speed of item identification differences are discussed in terms of processing efficiency or the capacity needed to activate appropriate perceptual/ cognitive units and linguistic programs. Educational implications and the modifiability of processing efficiency are discussed. The first recorded experiments on memory span were conducted by Ebbinghaus in 1885 (published in 1913) in his pioneering application of the scientific method to the study of the "higher mental processes." These experiments grew out of his investigation of the functional relation between the ease of learning a series and its length. Ebbinghaus found that the maximum number of items he could reproduce perfectly immediately following a single presentation—his span1— was generally seven, with remarkably few exceptions. Other studies fashioned after Ebbinghaus's procedures followed soon thereafter, and in the first review of the memory literature (Burnham, 1888-1889), several pages (607-609) were devoted almost exclusively
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Cites background from "Pauses as recoding points in letter..."
...If the groupings or chunks in the input do not match those usually used by subjects in organizing their own memories, the input groupings may hinder recall performance (Bower and Springston 1970)....
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TL;DR: It is found that subjects were less sensitive to grammatical violations that preserved their chunks than to violations that did not, and the theory of competitive chunking is derived and successfully reproduces, via computer simulations, both Miller's experimental results and the author's own.
Abstract: : When exposed to a regular stimulus field, for instance generated by an artificial grammar, subjects unintentionally learn to respond efficiently to the underlying structure: Miller (1958) reports that subjects memorize letter strings generated by an artificial grammar faster than randomly generated strings. Reber (1967) reports that, following rote memorization of exemplar sentences, subjects efficiently discriminate grammatical from non-grammatical strings. We explored the hypothesis that the learning process is chunking and that grammatical knowledge is implicitly encoded in a hierarchical network of chunks. Grammatical judgments are then based on the degree to which integrated representations of strings can be built using those chunks. We trained subjects on exemplar sentences while inducing them to form specific chunks. Their grammatical knowledge was then tested with a discrimination task. We found that subjects were less sensitive to grammatical violations that preserved their chunks than to violations that did not. We derived the theory of competitive chunking (CC) and found that is successfully reproduces, via computer simulations, both Miller's experimental results and our own. Keywords: Unintentional learning, Artificial grammars, Chunking, Perception(Psychology).
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Cites background from "Pauses as recoding points in letter..."
...A subject's chunking behavior is often revealed at recall by "transitionerror probabilities" (e.g., Bower & Springston, 1970; Johnson, 1970) or "subjective organization" (Tulving, 1962)....
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...A subject's chunking behavior is often revealed at recall by "transitionerror probabilities" (e.g., Bower & Springston, 1970; Johnson, 1970) or "subjective organization" (Tulving, 1962)....
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References
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370 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, recall is viewed as a search through memory and a data-processor might be programmed to find the desired response, and it is suggested that it can as a practical matter be useful to regard recall as a searching through memory.
358 citations
TL;DR: This article studied the effect of group structure on the recognition and recall of digit series and proposed a reallocation hypothesis, whereby group structure affects perceptual coding, which determines ''where\" the trace of the event is stored.
Abstract: Recognition and recall of digit series were studied as a function of segmental groupings imposed on the series either by the location of pauses or in the naming of successive numerical groups, e.g., 1735 was read to S as \"seventeen, thirty-five.\" Experiments show that alteration of group structure of the same underlying digit string severely degraded memorial recognition of its repetition and that the normal improvement in immediate recall with repetition was annihilated by changing groupings at each presentation. Although a second presentation of a string with altered groupings is not recognized as a repetition of its earlier occurrence, this event is equivalent to an exact repetition when they are assessed by 5\"'s later ability to. recognize an ungrouped version of the underlying string. Repetition with the same groupings establishes one strong trace, whereas repetition with changed groupings establishes two weak traces either of which may mediate recognition of the uncoded version of the string. The \"reallocation\" hypothesis was proposed as a summary of these results, whereby group structure affects perceptual coding, which determines \"where\" the trace of the event is stored. This was contrasted to a \"bin\" hypothesis for serial recall. Experiments to differentiate these involved recall of strings in which only a subsequence or portion recurred. As predicted by the reallocation hypothesis, recall of the recurrent constant chunk improved only when it was located at the beginning of the string.
229 citations