Temporal Versus Positional Processing Structures
It was described above that claims for both temporal and positional structures have strong empirical support. Our capacity to monitor the passage of time may strengthen our ability to recall a list of items: the data clearly indicate that in the case of list learning the memory function codes for position information. Thus, a position-processing structure, as against a temporal structure, could be the function that provides ordered list recall. But a different claim was made at the beginning of the present chapter. It was suggested that the process that provides ordered recall of a list of words may well be, and probably is, the same process that provides our ability to remember the events of our lives in sequence. Thus, if I first drive a car and then enter a café, order tea, receive, pay for, and drink the tea, and next drive to a grocery store, then my ability to remember the order in which these events occurred may be provided by a processing structure operating in the same way as the control state models described in the present chapter.