Irrelevant changing-state vibrotactile stimuli disrupt verbal serial recall: implications for theories of interference in short-term memory
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
What causes interference in short-term memory? We report the novel finding that immediate memory for visually-presented verbal items is sensitive to disruption from task-irrelevant vibrotactile stimuli. Specifically, short-term memory for a visual sequence is disrupted by a concurrently presented sequence of vibrations, but only when the vibrotactile sequence entails change (when the sequence “jumps” between the two hands). The impact on visual-verbal serial recall was similar in magnitude to that for auditory stimuli (Experiment 1). Performance of the missing item task, requiring recall of item-identity rather than item-order, was unaffected by changing-state vibrotactile stimuli (Experiment 2), as with changing-state auditory stimuli. Moreover, the predictability of the changing-state sequence did not modulate the magnitude of the effect, arguing against an attention-capture conceptualisation (Experiment 3). Results support the view that interference in short-term memory is produced by conflict between incompatible, amodal serial-ordering processes (interference-by-process) rather than interference between similar representational codes (interference-by-content).
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it