Mark Hurlstone

We start with a brief review of evidence that verbal working memory (WM) involves a limited capacity phonological loop capable of retaining verbal sequences for a few seconds in immediate serial recall, vocabulary acquisition, speech production and language comprehension. The challenge of explaining how such a system handles information about serial order is discussed in the context of computational models of the immediate recall of unstructured sequences of words, letters, or digits, an extensively studied laboratory task for which there are many benchmark findings. Evaluating computational models against these benchmarks suggests a serial ordering mechanism in which items are simultaneously active before being selected for sequential output by a process of competitive queuing (CQ). Further evidence shows how this process may operate in the context of sequences that conform to various kinds of linguistic constraint. We conclude by suggesting that CQ is a promising theoretical mechanism for connecting and potentially unifying theories of WM and language processing more generally despite major differences in their scope and level of abstraction.

Research in social and cognitive sciences has used the Construal Level Theory (CLT) of psychological distance as a framework for understanding environmental challenges such as climate change. This primer reflects on the how psychological distance and construal can help to understand environmental challenges, from the perceptions and social construction of environmental issues as distant and abstract, to implications for decision-making and action towards long-term targets. We also reflect on areas where the theory and concept are less useful, when assuming that psychological distance and construal level can be easily reduced or altered to promote lasting changes to environmental action.

The COVID 19 pandemic has seen a surge of health misinformation, which has had serious consequences including direct harm and opportunity costs. We investigated (N = 678) the impact of such misinformation on hypothetical demand (i.e., willingness to pay) for an unproven treatment, and propensity to promote (i.e., like or share) misinformation online. This is a novel approach, as previous research has used mainly questionnaire based measures of reasoning. We also tested two interventions to counteract the misinformation, contrasting a tentative refutation based on materials used by health authorities with an enhanced refutation based on best practice recommendations. We found prior exposure to misinformation increased misinformation promotion (by 18%). Both tentative and enhanced refutations reduced demand (by 18% and 25%, respectively) as well as misinformation promotion (by 29% and 55%). The fact that enhanced refutations were more effective at curbing promotion of misinformation highlights the need for debunking interventions to follow current best practice guidelines.

The COVID-19 pandemic has understandably dominated public discourse, crowding out other important issues such as climate change. Currently, if climate change enters the arena of public debate, it primarily does so in direct relation to the pandemic. In two experiments, we investigated (1) whether portraying the response to the COVID-19 threat as a “trial run” for future climate action would increase climate-change concern and mitigation support, and (2) whether portraying climate change as a concern that needs to take a “back seat” while focus lies on economic recovery would decrease climate-change concern and mitigation support. We found no support for the effectiveness of a trial-run frame in either experiment. In Experiment 1, we found that a back-seat frame reduced participants’ support for mitigative action. In Experiment 2, the back-seat framing reduced both climate change concern and mitigation support; a combined inoculation and refutation was able to offset the drop in climate concern but not the reduction in mitigation support.

Serial memory refers to the ability to recall a novel sequence of items or events in the correct order. In the laboratory, the dominant tool used to assess this mental faculty is the immediate serial recall (hereafter, ‘serial recall’) task in which participants are given a sequence of typically verbal, visual, or spatial items that they must subsequently recall in their original presentation order. Serial recall is a deceptively simple task—the apparent ease with which people accomplish it masks the wealth and complexity of findings this task has generated, and the computational theories that have been developed to account for them. In this chapter, I review benchmark findings of serial recall that have been observed across the verbal, visual, and spatial short-term memory domains, and I interpret them with reference to the core mechanisms embodied in contemporary computational theories of serial recall. This analysis identifies four mechanisms that are common to the three content domains—namely, position marking, a primacy gradient, competitive queuing, and response suppression. Additionally, evidence suggests that in verbal serial recall both the encoding and retrieval of items is sensitive to item similarity—similarity-sensitive encoding and retrieval—and that item retrieval is accompanied by output interference. By contrast, in visual and spatial serial recall there is evidence for similarity-sensitive retrieval, but the relevant empirical observations that evince similarity-sensitive encoding and output interference are yet to be studied in the visual and spatial domains. I conclude by outlining some challenges for future research.