Memory for Serial Order Revisited

The critiques by Mewhort, Popham, and James (1994) and Nairne and Neath (1994) identified at least 6 potentially serious problems with Lewandowsky and Murdock's (1989) Theory of Distributed Associative Memory (TODAM) model of memory for serial order. The authors show that the flaws attributed to the memory component of TODAM are less serious than claimed, whereas the problems attributed to the response selection stage necessitated a process implementation of the previously unspecified deblurring mechanism. The deblurring process, implemented by a dynamic autoassociative network, is shown to handle most of the problems identified by the critics without imperiling TODAM's ability to handle basic serial position data.