AN INTEGRATED THEORY OF LIST MEMORY

The ACT-R theory (Anderson, 1993; Anderson & Lebiere, 1998) is applied to the list memory paradigms of serial recall, recognition memory, fr ee recall, and implicit memory. List memory performance in ACT-R is de termined by the level of activation of declarative chunks which encode that items occur in the list. This level of activation is in turn det ermined by amount of rehearsal, delay, and associative fan from a list node. This theory accounts for accuracy and latency profiles in backw ard and forward serial recall, set size effects in the Sternberg parad igm, length-strength effects in recognition memory, the Tulving-Wisema n function, serial position, length and practice effects in free recal l, and lexical priming in implicit memory paradigms. This wide variety of effects is predicted with minimal parameter variation. It is argue d that the strength of the ACT-R theory is that it offers a completely specified processing architecture that serves to integrate many exist ing models in the literature. (C) 1998 Academic Press.