RESEARCH ARTICLE
Spatial Descriptions Eliminate the Serial Position Effect
Ilaria Santoro1, Fabrizio Sors1, Serena Mingolo1, Valter Prpic2, 3, Tiziano Agostini1, Mauro Murgia1, *
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2023Volume: 16
E-location ID: e187435012301301
Publisher ID: e187435012301301
DOI: 10.2174/18743501-v16-230223-2022-71
Article History:
Received Date: 06/09/2022Revision Received Date: 11/01/2023
Acceptance Date: 16/01/2023
Electronic publication date: 29/03/2023
Collection year: 2023
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Aims:
The present study aims to investigate the occurrence of the serial position effect in the recall of items verbally presented in three different contexts.
Background:
The serial position effect has been studied with both verbal (e.g., words) and visuospatial (e.g., locations) stimuli but not with verbal-spatial stimuli (i.e., spatial description of an environment). In particular, a spatial description of an environment has both spatial information and a meaningful context.
Objective:
The objective of the present study is to determine whether the use of different contexts (namely, a classic word list, a spatial description of a room, and a narrative without spatial information) can alter the serial position effect.
Methods:
Depending on the condition, participants were exposed to a) a list of objects, b) a spatial description of a room containing the same objects; c) a narrative presenting the same objects in lack of spatial information. After this learning phase, participants performed a recognition task.
Results:
The recognition task revealed different accuracy distributions in the three conditions. In particular, in the spatial description condition, the accuracy distribution did not change across the item position.
Conclusion:
This result is in line with previous studies with visuospatial stimuli. Thus, it seems that spatial descriptions are a particular kind of verbal stimuli, which are encoded similarly to visuospatial stimuli. Overall, these outcomes support the idea that spatial descriptions elicit a spatial representation, which enhances item retention and eliminates the serial position effect.
