Sequential Processing Facilitates Hebb Repetition Learning in Visuospatial Domains

Exposure to the same information improves auditory/verbal short-term memory performance, but such improvement is not always observed in visual short-term memory. In this study, we demonstrate that sequential processing makes visuospatial repetition learning efficient in a paradigm that employs a similar design previously used for an auditory/verbal domain. When we presented sets of color patches simultaneously in Experiments 1-4, recall accuracy did not increase with repetition; however, once color patches were presented sequentially in Experiment 5, accuracy did increase rapidly with repetition, even when participants engaged in articulatory suppression. Moreover, these learning dynamics matched those in Experiment 6, which used verbal materials. These findings suggest that (a) sequential focus on each item facilitates a repetition learning effect, indicating a temporal bottleneck is involved early in this process and (b) repetition learning is mechanistically similar across sensory modalities even though these modalities differently specialize in processing spatial or temporal information. Public Significance Statement We acquire knowledge of the world by learning the regularities of what occurs repeatedly. Such learning has been shown to occur in a variety of modalities, including visual and verbal, from early ages, even if one is not aware of the regularity. However, it has also been noted that the learning effect is small or absent in some situations. As the majority of evidence for regularity learning is associated with temporal sequence processing, it is possible that a temporal bottleneck exists during the early stages of the learning. This study provides insight into learning mechanisms that operate in the visuospatial domain and presents avenues for further investigation of the interaction between short-term and long-term memory.