Memory for Order
Jeremy Caplan
University of Alberta

Much of what we need to remember has sequential structure that provides as much meaning as the constituent items (e.g., the alphabet, a phone number, dog house versus house dog). Unsurprisingly, then, memory for order has been extensively studied with experimental behavioural and cognitive modeling approaches, and has been recently accelerating in cognitive neuroscience. Rather than lobby for a particular model, I will examine specific assumptions that subsets of order-memory models share, and present behavioural and brain-activity evidence that test these assumptions. These include the relationship between associations and serial list memory (is a list built from associations, or are associations stored like a list?), mechanisms of serial-order judgements and how (and how much) order we remember