Spatial Coding of Serial Verbal Input

60 Ss were given 8 lists consisting of 9 consonants each to recall. The letters were presented serially either at the same location on a memory drum, at different locations haphazardly arranged across the viewing slot, or left to right at different locations. Both where and when an S wrote an item during recall were recorded. Although total items recalled remained the same, temporal position recall declined with practice while spatial location recall was sensitive only to whether or not the items had been shown in left to right order. The results indicate that spatial coding of serial verbal input can occur, at least when stimuli are presented in a spatially coherent fashion, and that spatial coding is not necessarily derived from temporal ordering of the stimuli in memory.