Visual similarity effects in immediate serial recall and (sometimes) in immediate serial recognition

Positive correlation between working memory and face-to-face social interaction in everyday life

Working memory (WM) plays a crucial role in various cognitive tasks from language comprehension to problem-solving. However, its influence on social activities has remained largely unexplored. The current two studies on individual differences, a pilot (N = 329) and a pre-registered direct replication (N = 338) study, investigated the relationship between WM and outside-the-lab social interaction by using a listening span task and three social network questionnaires (e.g., how many people a participant had contacted in the past month). The consistent patterns in the two studies were (a) WM recall was positively correlated with social network size, (b) WM recall remained positively correlated with social network size even when accounting for online interactions on WhatsApp and Facebook, and (c) WM recall was positively correlated with social network size by face-to-face interaction. These novel findings would suggest connections between WM and face-to-face social interaction. It was, however, acknowledged that the obtained effect sizes were small, and that further investigation is indeed necessary. In light of this, we also clarify future directions for understanding the relationship between WM and social interaction.

Are brand names special words? Letter visual-similarity affects the identification of brand names, but not common words

Brand names are often considered a special type of words of special relevance to examine the role of visual codes during reading: unlike common words, brand names are typically presented with the same letter-case configuration (e.g., IKEA, adidas). Recently, Pathak et al. (European Journal of Marketing, 2019, 53, 2109) found an effect of visual similarity for misspelled brand names when the participants had to decide whether the brand name was spelled correctly or not (e.g., tacebook [baseword: facebook] was responded more slowly and less accurately than xacebook). This finding is at odds with both orthographically based visual-word recognition models and prior experiments using misspelled common words (e.g., viotin [baseword: violin] is identified as fast as viocin). To solve this puzzle, we designed two experiments in which the participants had to decide whether the presented item was written correctly. In Experiment 1, following a procedure similar to Pathak et al. (European Journal of Marketing, 2019, 53, 2109), we examined the effect of visual similarity on misspelled brand names with/without graphical information (e.g., anazon vs. atazon [baseword: amazon]). Experiment 2 was parallel to Experiment 1, but we focused on misspelled common words (e.g., anarillo vs. atarillo; baseword: amarillo [yellow in Spanish]). Results showed a sizeable effect of visual similarity on misspelled brand names - regardless of their graphical information, but not on misspelled common words. These findings suggest that visual codes play a greater role when identifying brand names than common words. We examined how models of visual-word recognition can account for this dissociation.

Phonological store and speechreading performance of Chinese students with hearing impairment

This study presents three experiments to examine the role of the phonological store component of working memory in the speechreading performance of students with hearing impairment (HI) in China. In Experiment 1, 86 high school students with HI completed an immediate serial recall task with four lists of monosyllabic words that differed in phonological and visual similarities. In Experiment 2 and Experiment 3, 40 participants divided into high or low phonological store capacity (PS) and 40 participants divided into high or low visual phonological story capacity (VPS) completed a speechreading test at the word, phrase and sentence levels. Results revealed that (1) immediate serial recall showed effects of phonological and visual similarity and their interaction; (2) there was no significant effect of phonological store capacities on speechreading; and (3) there was a significant effect of visual phonological store capacities on accuracy but not speed of speechreading. These findings point to a general phonological store system for visual orthographic coding and phonological coding that students with HI engage in speechreading in Chinese. It provides evidence for the contention that the visual-based coding has a more direct impact on speechreading performance of Chinese students with HI than the speech-based coding.

Do we use visual codes when information is not presented visually?

For many years, the working/short-term memory literature has been dominated by the study of phonological codes. Consequently, insufficient attention has been devoted to visual codes. In the present study, we attempt to remedy the situation by exploring a critical aspect of modern models of working memory, namely the principle that responses do not depend primarily on what kinds of materials are presented, but on what kinds of codes are generated from those materials. More specifically, we used the visual similarity effect as a tool to ask whether there is a generation of visual codes when information is not presented visually. In two immediate serial recall experiments, we manipulated the visual similarity (similar words, dissimilar words), the presentation modality (visual presentation, auditory presentation), and concurrent articulation (none, concurrent articulation). We observed a visual similarity effect independent of presentation modality. Comparable results were observed with two different sets of stimuli and with or without concurrent articulation. Thus, for the first time, we demonstrate that, from acoustically presented word lists, visual codes in working/short-term memory are generated, producing a visual similarity effect. It is now clear that the encoding of visual or acoustic presentation to include the opposite type of representation is bidirectional.