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Measuring recall for audio information with different pitch and time patterns

Consistent with capacity theories of attention, attention can be sustained to the extent that spare mental resources remain available. The traditional lecture in higher education has received criticism for being too long to hold a student’s attention. This is based on several author’s claims that there is a measurable decrement in student attention after approximately 10-15 minutes of sustained content delivery. The present research aimed to investigate if providing small, separate units of an asynchronous lecture is able to enhance motivation for task engagement through perceived achievability of the learning outcomes, and consequently, enhance sustained attention amongst postgraduate university students. Utilising a quasiexperimental design, 51 postgraduate psychology students were recruited by opportunistic sampling from a cognitive psychology lecture on an MSc Psychology course, and given the option to watch either a long, single-video version of a lecture, or the same lecture delivered as smaller separate video chunks. Key findings indicate that presenting the material as smaller separate video units increased the perceived achievability of the learning outcomes and reduced the number of attention lapses experienced, but not the duration of those lapses, all measured via self-report single-item measures. The shorter separate videos condition also saw greater levels of break taking compliance. Looking at the sample as a whole using a hierarchical regression analysis, whilst controlling for student mind wandering tendencies as measured by the Mind Excessively Wandering Scale (MEWS), taking breaks was a significant negative predictor of attention lapses. Taken together, this suggests taking breaks is an integral part of sustained attention, and that chunking lectures into separate video units increases break taking compliance. Therefore, when designing online asynchronous learning material, lecturers should consider the value of chunking learning material for its potential direct and indirect effect on sustained attention.

The ITL in Tone Sequences: monitoring the beat We try to replicate earlier results on the ITL in tone sequences with a modified task: Modifying intensity and duration in tone or syllable sequences, we ask participants in a perception experiment(i) Whether a tone/speech sequence ended on a beat or ended on an off-beat, (ii) we ask whether they heard iambs (groups/words with final prominence) or trochees (groups/words with initial prominence).

The relationship between phrasing and prominence has been explored in other languages, for example, in English (Wagner & McAuliffe, 2019) and Dutch (Cambier-Langeveld, 1999). In this study, we will investigate Mandarin. We will measure acoustic correlates of prominence and phrasing -- intensity, f0, duration, vowel formants, and spectral tilt-- and test whether prominence and phrasing interact.

Prior research on the ITL in speech (sequences of syllables) showed that in French, durational cues are not used to the same extent as in English in order to parse the signal into words, while intensity is used in similar ways (Hay & Diehl 2007). This experiment tries to replicate this difference between the languages, and furthermore test how the languages differ with respect to the parsing of prominence.

In sequences of otherwise equal tones and syllables, listeners tend to hear iambs if ever other tone/syllable is longer, and trochees if every other tone/syllable is louder. This is called the iambic-trochaic law. There have also been claims that pitch has similar effects to intensity with respect to the ITL. However, prior evidence is potentially confounded, since task(often: did you hear iamb/trochee?) does not allow to infer whether low or high pitch/frequency was perceived as prominent. Here, we test how consistent prominence is perceived on high/low syllable/tone, and also whether there is greater variability in the effect of pitch because pitch in speech can be either interpreted as the reflex of a pitch accent or of a boundary tone. We also test how similar tone vs. syllable perception is. Finally, we will look at how intensity and duration affect the interpretation of pitch.

Prior research on the ITL in tone sequences showed that in Japanese, at least some listeners have a long-first preference, and hear longer tones as group-initial, while English listeners usually show the long-last effect originally observed by Bolton (1894). This experiments tries to replicate this difference in speech, and furthermore test whether the differences between Japanese and English are due to differences in prominence perception or to differences in grouping perception.

Prior research on the so-called iambic trochaic was conducted on sequences of tone, or on sequences of speech syllables that, when heard as words, constituted nonsense words ("baba" or "gaba" /"baga", ...). We test whether the same generalizations apply when listeners listen to sequences of actually existing words in the speech stream, and at the same time try to conceptually replicate recent results from experiments that show evidence that the ITL results from the simultaneous parsing of the signal along two dimensions, prominence and grouping. (added an amendment on OSF before data collection on Oct 26 2020)

There are two main theories to explain the mechanisms through which statistical learning occurs: bracketing and chunking. The bracketing approach (e.g., Cairns, Shillcock, Chater, & Levy, 1997; Christiansen, Allen, & Seidenberg, 1998; Saffrin, Aslin, & Newport, 1996) suggests that statistical learning occurs through the transitional probabilities between successive items in a sequence. This is thought to include both forward and backward transitional probabilities as well as long-distance dependencies. There are several different models of the chunking approach, but the most empirically validated is PARSER (Perruchet, 2019; Perruchet & Vintner, 1998). PARSER suggests that statistical learning occurs through the extraction of units from the sequence initially at random. If the unit is encountered again, the representation of that unit is strengthened in memory. But as time progresses in between activations of that representation, it weakens through decay. Furthermore, encountering other units with similar constituent features results in interference, further weakening the representation for that unit. The strength of the representation of that unit continues to be adjusted and a stable representation for true units (i.e., ones that actually exist within the sequence) are formed and false units (i.e., mis-parsings of the sequence) become weaker. These two approaches to statistical learning vary in important ways. In the bracketing approach, transitional probabilities are computed between all co-occurring units. These calculations are thought to be continuously updated with each additional exposure, and the mental representations for both the full unit (e.g., abc) and the sub-units that it is comprised of (e.g., ab and bc) are reinforced as training continues. In contrast, the PARSER approach to chunking suggests that the increasing strength of units will interfere with representations of the sub-unit resulting in decay of representations of the sub-unit. Giroux & Rey (2009) directly compared the representation of units and sub-units using both a computation model and human participants during an auditory task with nonsense syllables. During the test phase, both simulated and human participants were asked to choose between a partial unit (i.e., a unit that spanned a boundary between units; e.g., CD from abC and Def) with either a true unit or a sub-unit. After 10 minutes of exposure, both the simulated and human participants showed higher accuracy for choosing units than for choosing sub-units. This suggests that, in line with the chunking approach to statistical learning, participants had learned the full units better than their constituent components. While the Giroux & Rey (2009) study provided strong support for the chunking approach, it, as well as most statistical learning studies to date, focused on testing learning using explicit methods where participants must make a decision about how likely it was that a unit came from a training sequence. This is in stark contrast with the nature of the learning itself which is often described as an implicit rather than explicit process (e.g., Conway, 2020). Recently, however, tasks based on reaction times have been devised to examine more implicit learning of statistical structure (e.g., Batterink, Reber, Neville, & Paller, 2015; Siegelman, Bogaerts, Kronenfeld, & Frost, 2018). In one such task (Siegelman et al., 2018), participants are asked to view a series of stimuli sequentially that are covertly arranged into triplets. Unlike tradition statistical learning paradigms in which the stimuli are presented at a fixed rate, participants choose their own rate of progression by pressing a button following the presentation of each stimulus. Siegelman and colleagues found that, after controlling for between-subject variability, participants typically took longer to press a button after the presentation of a triplet in the first position than in either the second or third position with no difference in the duration of the latter two stimuli. Notably, the second and third stimuli in a sequence are always predictable based on the preceding stimulus. However, stimuli in the first position are less predictable because they can follow any of the other triplets in the stimulus set. As such, quicker reaction times for stimuli in the second and third position suggest that participants were able to extract the statistical structure of the sequence and were anticipating these latter two stimuli in the triplets. The present experiment proposes to use this self-paced statistical learning paradigm (Siegelman et al., 2018) to examine the implicit learning of units compared to sub-units in a visual statistical learning task. In particular, it examines how reaction time to stimuli embedded within learned triplets changes when the triplet is rearranged such that the first stimulus in a triplet is moved to the end of the triplet instead (e.g., Abc is changed to bcA).

This study tries to replicate and expand on earlier results obtained in our lab for English, this time using an online study. Participants produce sequences of nonce words. Our goal is to establish how intensity, duration, pitch, pause duration, and vowel formants provide cues for prominence (which syllable is stressed?) and grouping/segmentation (which syllable is at the beginning/in the middle/at the end of a word.

© 2020 the American Physiological Society Many motor skills are learned with the help of instructions. In the context of complex motor sequences, instructions often break down the movement into chunks that can then be practiced in isolation. Thus, instructions shape an initial cognitive representation of the skill, which in turn guides practice. Are there ways of breaking up a motor sequence that are better than others? If participants are instructed in a way that hinders performance, how much practice does it take to overcome the influence of the instruction? To answer these questions, we used a paradigm in which participants were asked to perform finger sequences as fast and accurately as possible on a keyboard-like device. In the initial phases of training, participants had to explicitly remember and practice two- or three-digit chunks. These chunks were then combined to form seven 11-digit sequences that participants practiced for the remainder of the study. Each sequence was broken up into chunks in a way such that the instruction was either aligned or misaligned with the basic execution-level constraints. We found that misaligned chunk instruction led to an initial performance deficit compared with the aligned chunk instruction. Overall, instructions still influenced the temporal pattern of performance after 10 days of subsequent training, with shorter interpress intervals within a chunk compared with between chunks. However, for the misaligned instructed sequences, this temporal pattern was altered more rapidly, such that participants could overcome the induced performance deficit in the last week. At the end of training, participants found idiosyncratic, but interindividually stable, ways of performing each sequence. NEW & NOTEWORTHY Instructions often break down motor sequences into smaller parts, such that they can be more easily remembered. Here, we show that different ways of breaking down a finger sequence can subsequently lead to better or worse performance. The initial instruction still influenced the temporal performance pattern after 10 days of practice. The results demonstrate that the initial cognitive representation of a motor skill strongly influences how a skill is learned and performed.

Memory for verbal material improves when words form familiar chunks. But how does the improvement due to chunking come about? Two possible explanations are that the input might be actively recoded into chunks, each of which takes up less memory capacity than items not forming part of a chunk (a form of data compression), or that chunking is based on redintegration. If chunking is achieved by redintegration, representations of chunks exist only in long-term memory (LTM) and help to reconstructing degraded traces in short-term memory (STM). In 6 experiments using 2-alternative forced choice recognition and immediate serial recall we find that when chunks are small (2 words) they display a pattern suggestive of redintegration, whereas larger chunks (3 words), show a pattern consistent with data compression. This concurs with previous data showing that there is a cost involved in recoding material into chunks in STM. With smaller chunks this cost seems to outweigh the benefits of recoding words into chunks. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

How do learners make sense of their intricately structured visual and auditory environments? One important learning mechanism available to both infants and adults is the ability to detect statistical structure within visual and auditory inputs. Despite the scope of this “statistical learning” (SL) ability and the large literature that now surrounds it, the processes underlying SL, and how those processes may differ across modalities and change across development, remain unclear.The goal of this dissertation was to clarify these mechanistic questions. Paper 1 reviews previous work on visual and auditory SL across development, highlighting the debate concerning the domain-generality of SL. Paper 2 investigates the domain-generality of infants’ SL by employing a visual SL task comparable to previous auditory SL tasks. Findings from four experiments with 8-month-olds suggest that visual SL is constrained compared to auditory SL in infancy. Individual differences in visual SL performances were unrelated to visual short-term memory performances, but were related to overall cognitive ability. These findings suggest that visual SL ability is important for, and constrained by, early cognitive development.Papers 3 and 4 examine the representations that result from visual SL. I evaluate the ability of two major classes of SL models – statistical models and chunking models - to correctly predict adults’ and infants’ performances on visual SL tasks. Across five experiments, adults and 8-month-old infants discriminated between high- and low-probability visual sequences, providing strong evidence of SL. Critically, adults represented pairs of items embedded within larger sequences, but did not represent so-called “illusory sequences.” These results support the competitive chunking model of Servan-Schreiber and Anderson (1990), and suggest that adults represented visual sequences in terms of hierarchical levels of chunks. In contrast, 8-month-olds did not show evidence of representing embedded or illusory sequences, suggesting that infants represented visual sequences in terms of only the highest level of chunks. Together, these studies not only suggest that the representations that result from visual SL are best captured by chunking models, but also that the type of chunking learners engage in may change between infancy and adulthood.

The auditory dorsal stream has been implicated in sensorimotor integration and concatenation of sequential sound events, both being important for processing of speech and music. The auditory ventral stream, by contrast, is characterized as subserving sound identification and recognition. We studied the respective roles of the dorsal and ventral streams, including recruitment of basal ganglia and medial temporal lobe structures, in the processing of tone sequence elements. A sequence was presented incrementally across several runs during functional magnetic resonance imaging in humans, and we compared activation by sequence elements when heard for the first time (“novel”) versus when the elements were repeating (“familiar”). Our results show a shift in tone-sequence-dependent activation from posterior-dorsal cortical areas and the basal ganglia during the processing of less familiar sequence elements towards anterior and ventral cortical areas and the medial temporal lobe after the encoding of highly familiar sequence elements into identifiable auditory objects.

Psycholinguistic research over the past decade has suggested that children's linguistic knowledge includes dedicated representations for frequently‐encountered multiword sequences. Important evidence for this comes from studies of children's production: it has been repeatedly demonstrated that children's rate of speech errors is greater for word sequences that are infrequent and thus unfamiliar to them than for those that are frequent. In this study, we investigate whether children's knowledge of multiword sequences can explain a phenomenon that has long represented a key theoretical fault line in the study of language development: errors of subject‐auxiliary non‐inversion in question production (e.g., “why we can't go outside?*”). In doing so we consider a type of error that has been ignored in discussion of multiword sequences to date. Previous work has focused on errors of omission – an absence of accurate productions for infrequent phrases. However, if children make use of dedicated representations for frequent sequences of words in their productions, we might also expect to see errors of commission – the appearance of frequent phrases in children's speech even when such phrases are not appropriate. Through a series of corpus analyses, we provide the first evidence that the global input frequency of multiword sequences (e.g., “she is going” as it appears in declarative utterances) is a valuable predictor of their errorful appearance (e.g., the uninverted question “what she is going to do?*”) in naturalistic speech. This finding, we argue, constitutes powerful evidence that multiword sequences can be represented as linguistic units in their own right.

Short-term verbal memory is improved when words can be chunked into larger units. Miller (1956) suggested that the capacity of verbal short-term memory is determined by the number of chunks that can be stored in memory, rather than by the number of items or the amount of information. But how does the improvement due to chunking come about, and is memory really determined by the number of chunks? One possibility is that chunking is a form of data compression. It allows more information to be stored in the available capacity. An alternative is that chunking operates primarily by redintegration. Chunks exist only in long-term memory, and enable the corresponding items in short-term memory to be reconstructed more reliably from a degraded trace. We review the data favoring each of these views and discuss the implications of treating chunking as data compression. Contrary to Miller, we suggest that memory capacity is primarily determined both by the amount of information that can be stored but also by the underlying representational vocabulary of the memory system. Given the limitations on the representations that can be stored in verbal short-term memory, chunking can sometimes allow the information capacity of short-term memory to be exploited more efficiently. (202 words).

The current university student population mainly consists of students born between the years 1995 – 2012. This cohort has grown up in a world of technological stimulation and many expect their learning and teaching environment to reflect this (Chaudhuri, 2020). In response to this shift in student expectation there has been an increased focus on flipped learning where classrooms provide active learning activities to engage students. This article investigated student motivation and engagement in an active-learning, flipped classroom which implemented elements of gamification while supporting students’ psychological needs of autonomy, relatedness and connection. A mixed-methods approach utilising student perception surveys and focus groups was used to assess student motivation and engagement. The data revealed a significant number of students were motivated and engaged in the learning process throughout the course. Students commented positively on the variety of gamification techniques used to enhance engagement. Students indicated their writing, presentation and comprehension improved throughout the course. In addition to focusing on non-technical gamification elements, the learning and teaching process included chunking pre and in-class materials which may have assisted with student engagement and comprehension. It is concluded the learning and teaching approach implemented contributes to motivating and engaging our current GenZ students in the learning and teaching process.

To better understand the benefits of using analogy and explicit instructions, the underlying cognitive mechanism remains to be explored. The concept of chunking provides a promising approach to the cognitive mechanism of instructions and can be approximated by analyzing athletes’ mental representations. The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of analogy and explicit instructions on performance and the cognitive representations of the tennis serve in intermediate participants over the course of a 5-week training period. Junior tennis players (N = 44; M = 11.5 years) were tested on their tennis serve and, based on their initial performance and their individual error patterns, assigned to one of three groups: an analogy group (N = 15), an explicit group (N = 15), or a control group (N = 14). Their performance and their mental representation structures were assessed prior to and after the 5-week training period and again after a retention period of 14 days. Independent of group, findings demonstrated higher velocity from pretest to posttest. Participants in both the analogy and the explicit group showed enhanced accuracy over time and more functional mental representation structures. Thus, both analogy instruction and explicit instruction helped to structure mental representations in their long-term memory.

In this chapter we attempt to separate the communal and the individual level of language representation and explore how linguistic regularities emerge at each of them. We sample one communal and ten individual corpora of language use from the same ELF environment and examine to what extent syntactic structure, priming and chunking influence linguistic choice in each corpus by looking at the variation between contracted and full forms (it is/it’s). We find clear differences in how these three factors work across the corpora and attempt to interpret them in relation to the properties of individual languages, language change and the role of ELF.

Existing models of short-term sequence memory can account for effects of long-term knowledge on the recall of individual items, but have rarely addressed the effects of long-term sequential constraints on recall. We examine syntactic constraints on the ordering of words in verbal short-term memory in four experiments. People were found to have better memory for sequences that more strongly conform to English syntax, and that errors in recall tended to make output sequences more syntactic (i.e., a syntactic bias). Model simulations suggest that the syntactic biasing in verbal short-term recall was more likely to be accounted for by a redintegration mechanism acting over multiple items in the sequence. The data were less well predicted by a model in which syntactic constraints operate via the chunking of sequences at encoding. The results highlight that models of short-term memory should be extended to include syntactic constraints from long-term representations—most likely via redintegration mechanisms acting over multiple items—but we also note the challenge of incorporating such constraints into most existing models.

Mycket av vår kognitiva förmåga beror på lagringen och bearbetande av meningen olika objekt, ord eller handlingar innefattar. Denna mening kallas för semantik där semantik inom arbetsminne har till största del ignorerats och istället tillskrivits långtids semantiskt minne. Med användning Baddley och Hitch model av arbetsminne är målet av denna studie att tillskriva semantisk bearbetning till en komponent inom modellen, undersöka skillnader mellan typer av semantiskt material till episodiskt material och hur dessa är påverkade av seriella positionseffekter. Relaterad semantik, orelaterad semantik och episodiskt material var inkluderade i studien och var representerade av ord-par. 42 deltagare, med användningen av en bekvämlighetsurvalsmetod, blev slumpmässigt tilldelade ett av tre experimentella förhållanden designade för att förändra mängden material som de kan memorera. Det första experimentella förhållandet fastställde att med direkt återkallelse hade semantiskt material högre grad av återkallelse än episodiskt material. Det andra experimentella förhållandet visade att effekten av artikulatoriskt undertryckande (articulatory suppression) inte signifikant sänker mängden som memorerat. Det tredje förhållandet demonstrerade att fördröjd återkallelse signifikant förminskade mängden orelaterad semantik. Dessa resultat visade att semantiskt material återkallas till högre grad men relaterad semantik och orelaterad semantik lagras av olika system då orelaterad semantik är påverkad av förfall (decay) eller störning (interference). Resultaten visade betydelsen av att använda simpelt och precist språk för att ge ett mer effektivt sätt att memorera och lära sig., Much of our cognitive abilities rely on maintaining and processing the meaning of different objects, words or actions. This meaning is known as semantics however, the use of semantics in working memory have been mostly ignored and instead attributed to long-term semantic memory. Using Baddeley and Hitch’s model of working memory this study aims to attribute semantic maintenance to a component within the model, examine differences between types of semantic material to episodic material and how these were affected by serial position effects. Related semantics, unrelated semantics and episodic material were included in the study which were all represented by word-pairs. 42 participants, using a convenience sampling method, were randomly assigned to one of three experimental conditions designed to alter the amount of material memorized. The first experimental condition, by using immediate recall, demonstrated that semantic materials had a significantly superior recall rate than episodic materials. The second experimental condition showed that the effect articulatory suppression didn’t significantly reduce the amount memorized. The third condition demonstrated that delayed recall significantly reduced the amount of unrelated semantics. These findings showed that semantic materials had superior recall but related and unrelated semantic material were found to be maintained by different systems as unrelated material was subject to decay or interference. The results showed the importance using simple and precise language to provide a more effective way to memorize and learn.

Recent research has shown marked developmental increases in the apparent capacity of working memory. This recent research is based largely on performance on tasks in which a visual array is to be retained briefly for comparison with a subsequent probe display. Here we examined a possible theoretical alternative (or supplement) to a developmental increase in working memory in which children could improve in the ability to combine items in an array to form a coherent configuration. Elementary school children and adults received, on each trial, an array of colored spots to be remembered. On some trials, we provided structure in the probe display to facilitate the formation of a mental representation in which a coherent configuration is encoded. This stimulus structure in the probe display helped younger children, and thus reduced the developmental trend, but only on trials in which the participants were held responsible for the locations of items in the array. We conclude that, in addition to the development of the ability to form precise spatial configurations from items, the evidence is consistent with the existence of an actual developmental increase in working memory capacity for objects in an array.

Cognitive deficits are a frequent symptom of Parkinson's disease (PD), particularly in the domain of spatial working memory (WM). Despite numerous demonstrations of aberrant WM in patients, there is a lack of understanding about how, if at all, their WM is fundamentally altered. Most notably, it is unclear whether span - the yardstick upon which most WM models are built - is compromised by the disease. Moreover, it is also unknown whether WM deficits occur in all patients or only exist in a sub-group who are executively impaired. We assessed the factors that influenced spatial span in medicated patients by varying the complexity of to-be-remembered items. Principally, we manipulated the ease with which items could enter - or be blocked from - WM by varying the level of structure in memoranda. Despite having similar levels of executive performance to controls, PD patients were only impaired when remembering information that lacked spatial, easy-to-chunk, structure. Patients' executive function, however, did not influence this effect. The ease with which patients could control WM was further examined by presenting irrelevant information during encoding, varying the level of structure in irrelevant information and manipulating the amount of switching between relevant and irrelevant information. Disease did not significantly alter the effect of these manipulations. Rather, patients' executive performance constrained the detrimental effect of irrelevant information on WM. Thus, PD patients' spatial span is predominantly determined by level of structure in to-be-remembered information, whereas their level of executive function may mitigate against the detrimental effect of irrelevant information.

In the present study, using a new keyboard layout with only eight keys, we conducted typing training for unskilled typists. In this task, Japanese college students received training in typing words consisting of a pair of hiragana characters with four keystrokes, using the alphabetic input method, while keeping the association between the keys and typists' finger movements; the task was constructed so that chunking was readily available. We manipulated the association between the hiragana characters and alphabet letters (hierarchical materials: overlapped and nonoverlapped mappings). Our alphabet letter materials corresponded to the regular order within each hiragana word (within the four letters, the first and third referred to consonants, and the second and fourth referred to vowels). Only the interkeystroke intervals involved in the initiation of typing vowel letters showed an overlapping effect, which revealed that the effect was markedly large only during the early period of skill development (the effect for the overlapped mapping being larger than that for the nonoverlapped mapping), but that it had diminished by the time of late training. Conversely, the response time and the third interkeystroke interval, which are both involved in the latency of typing a consonant letter, did not reveal an overlapped effect, suggesting that chunking might be useful with hiragana characters rather than hiragana words. These results are discussed in terms of the fan effect and skill acquisition. Furthermore, we discuss whether there is a need for further research on unskilled and skilled Japanese typists.

© 2019 Elsevier Inc. Although it is widely accepted that the brain represents movement sequences hierarchically, the neural implementation of this organization is still poorly understood. To address this issue, we experimentally manipulated how participants represented sequences of finger presses at the levels of individual movements, chunks, and entire sequences. Using representational fMRI analyses, we then examined how this hierarchical structure was reflected in the fine-grained brain activity patterns of the participants while they performed the 8 trained sequences. We found clear evidence of each level of the movement hierarchy at the representational level. However, anatomically, chunk and sequence representations substantially overlapped in the premotor and parietal cortices, whereas individual movements were uniquely represented in the primary motor cortex. The findings challenge the common hypothesis of an orderly anatomical separation of different levels of an action hierarchy and argue for a special status of the distinction between individual movements and sequential context.

International audience; This paper attempts to evaluate the capacity of immediate memory to cope with new situations in relation to the compressibility of information likely to allow the formation of chunks. We constructed a task in which untrained participants had to immediately recall sequences of stimuli with possible associations between them. Compressibility of information was used to measure the chunkability of each sequence on a single trial. Compressibility refers to the recoding of information in a more compact representation. Although compressibility has almost exclusively been used to study long-term memory, our theory suggests that a compression process relying on redundancies within the structure of the list materials can occur very rapidly in immediate memory. The results indicated a span of about three items when the list had no structure, but increased linearly as structure was added. The amount of information retained in immediate memory was maximal for the most compressible sequences, particularly when information was ordered in a way that facilitated the compression process. We discuss the role of immediate memory in the rapid formation of chunks made up of new associations that did not already exist in long-term memory, and we conclude that immediate memory is the starting place for the reorganization of information.

Highlights • Fluid intelligence links closely to goal neglect in novel behaviour. • Neglect increases strongly with task complexity. • The task complexity effect is bounded by task-subtask structure. • We argue that complex behaviour is controlled in a series of attentional episodes. • A new account of fluid intelligence is based on episode construction., Task complexity is critical in cognitive efficiency and fluid intelligence. To examine functional limits in task complexity, we examine the phenomenon of goal neglect, where participants with low fluid intelligence fail to follow task rules that they otherwise understand. Though neglect is known to increase with task complexity, here we show that – in contrast to previous accounts – the critical factor is not the total complexity of all task rules. Instead, when the space of task requirements can be divided into separate sub-parts, neglect is controlled by the complexity of each component part. The data also show that neglect develops and stabilizes over the first few performance trials, i.e. as instructions are first used to generate behaviour. In all complex behaviour, a critical process is combination of task events with retrieved task requirements to create focused attentional episodes dealing with each decision in turn. In large part, we suggest, fluid intelligence may reflect this process of converting complex requirements into effective attentional episodes.

In this perspective we suggest that chunking can be used as an investigative tool to determine the characteristics of other cognitive phenomena. We present an example of the usefulness of chunking multiple responses to aid in understanding object switch costs. Switch costs refer to the shorter response times for manipulation of the same item on two trials in a row compared to a switch between items. It is presently unclear if this result is due to structural or strategic processes. We provide a short review of past literature on switch costs and a proof-of-concept example that chunking may shed new light on this topic. We examined this question with boxes filled with numbers to be arithmetically updated and memorized. A situation in which there were two response items to be manipulated per trial eliminated or reversed the switch cost effect. We suggest that participants use a strategy in which the two output responses were chunked together, making it unfeasible to prepare separately for a repetition of the most recent item as participants do in other circumstances. Our data suggest that even a well-studied phenomenon can benefit theoretically from the use of chunking as a research tool.

In three experiments, we investigated Hebb repetition learning (HRL) differences between children and adults, as a function of the type of item (lexical vs. sub-lexical) and the level of item-overlap between sequences. In a first experiment, it was shown that when non-repeating and repeating (Hebb) sequences of words were all permutations of the same words, HRL was slower than when the sequences shared no words. This item-overlap effect was observed in both children and adults. In a second experiment, we used syllable sequences and we observed reduced HRL due to item-overlap only in children. The findings are explained within a chunking account of the HRL effect on the basis of which we hypothesize that children, compared with adults, chunk syllable sequences in smaller units. By hypothesis, small chunks are more prone to interference from anagram representations included in the filler sequences, potentially explaining the item-overlap effect in children. This hypothesis was tested in a third experiment with adults where we experimentally manipulated the chunk size by embedding pauses in the syllable sequences. Interestingly, we showed that imposing a small chunk size caused adults to show the same behavioral effects as those observed in children. Departing from the analogy between verbal HRL and lexical development, the results are discussed in light of the less-is-more hypothesis of age-related differences in language acquisition.

This study addresses the role of cognitive control in the initiation and execution of familiar and unfamiliar movement sequences. To become familiar with two movement sequences participants first practiced two discrete key press sequences by responding to two fixed series of 6 key specific stimuli. In the ensuing test phase they executed these two familiar and also two unfamiliar keying sequences while there was a two-third chance a tone was presented together with one randomly selected key specific stimulus in each sequence. In the counting condition of the test phase participants counted the low pitched (i.e., target) tones. By and large the results support the dual processor model in which the prime role of the cognitive processor shifts from executing to initiating sequences while the gradual development of motor chunks allows a motor processor to execute the sequences. Yet, the results extend this simple model by suggesting that with little practice sequence execution is based also on some non-cognitive (perhaps associative) learning mechanism and, for some participants, on the use of explicit sequence knowledge. Also, after extensive practice the cognitive processor appears to still contribute to slower responses. The occurrence of long interkey intervals was replicated suggesting that fixed 6-key sequences include several motor chunks. Yet, no indication was found that the cognitive processor is responsible for concatenating these chunks.

Strong correlations between measures of fluid intelligence (or Spearman's g ) and working memory are widely reported in the literature, but there is considerable controversy concerning the nature of underlying mechanisms driving this relationship. In the four experiments presented here we consider the role of response conflict and task complexity in the context of real-time task execution demands (Experiments 1–3) and also address recent evidence that g confers an advantage at the level of task conceptualisation rather than (or in addition to) task execution (Experiment 4). We observed increased sensitivity of measured fluid intelligence to task performance in the presence (vs. the absence) of response conflict, and this relationship remained when task complexity was reduced. Performance- g correlations were also observed in the absence of response conflict, but only in the context of high task complexity. Further, we present evidence that differences in conceptualisation or ‘modelling’ of task instructions prior to execution had an important mediating effect on observed correlations, but only when the task encompassed a strong element of response inhibition. Our results suggest that individual differences in ability reflect, in large part, variability in the efficiency with which the relational complexity of task constraints are held in mind. It follows that fluid intelligence may support successful task execution through the construction of effective action plans via optimal allocation of limited resources.