Manual Control Of Presentation Promotes Short-term Order Memory

Order memory is the ability to code and maintain information about thesequential order of events in working memory. It is critical for informationorganization and retrieval in human computer interaction. The influence of the modeof presentation (manual controlled vs. automatic; spatial cues vs. no spatial cues) onorder memory was explored in two experiments. Order-reconstruction task was usedin experiment one. The results showed that (1) when there were no spatial cues,performance was higher in the manual controlled than in the automatic presentation;(2) when automatic presentation was used, performance was equivalent whether ornot there were spatial cues, and (3) when manual controlled presentation wascombined with spatial cues, backward recall became significantly easier, indicatingthat spatial encoding played a role in order memory. Corsi block-tapping task wasused in experiment two to explore the effects of the mode of presentation on serialspatial memory. Performance was enhanced in the manual controlled presentation.Overall, the data suggest that manual controlled presentation will promote short-termorder memory by means of spatial encoding. These results provide support formagnitude coding model and suggestion for information display design.