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NIH Public Access Author Manuscript Mem Cognit . Author manuscript; available in PMC 2012 February 20. N Published in final edited form as: I H Mem Cognit . 2012 February ; 40(2): 177–190. doi:10.3758/s13421-011-0142-8. - P A A u Positional and temporal clustering in serial order memory t h o r Alec Solway, M a Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA n u Bennet B. Murdock, and s c University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada r i p t Michael J. Kahana Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA Michael J. Kahana: kahana@ Abstract The well-known finding that responses in serial recall tend to be clustered around the position of N I the target item has bolstered positional-coding theories of serial order memory. In the present H - study, we show that this effect is confounded with another well-known finding—that responses in P A serial recall tend to also be clustered around the position of the prior recall (temporal clustering). A The confound can be alleviated by conditioning each analysis on the positional accuracy of the u previously recalled item. The revised analyses show that temporal clustering is much more t h o prevalent in serial recall than is positional clustering. A simple associative chaining model with r asymmetric neighboring, remote associations, and a primacy gradient can account for these M a effects. Using the same parameter values, the model produces reasonable serial position curves n u and captures the changes in item and order information across stud