The Japanese Society for Cognitive Psychology

People acquire regularity with repeated exposure to the same information, and it leads to efficient processing of the information. This is demonstrated as the Hebb repetition effect, in which the learners are assumed to learn item-item co-occurrence and position-item frequency statistics. To examine the domain-generality of these mechanisms underlying repetition-based learning, we investigated use of these two types of statistics in visual short-term memory with the same paradigm used in auditory-verbal short-term memory. The results suggest that i) repetition learning in the verbal and visuospatial domains is based on different processes, which rely on distinct features but share common learning principles, and operate in accordance with the modality of sensory input, and ii) sequential focus on each item is necessary to produce the repetition effect, indicating the involvement of a temporal bottleneck in learning process.