Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Current versions of distributed models have difficulty in accounting for the representation of order information in matching tasks. In this article, experiments are presented that allow discrimination between physical and ordinal representations of ordinal information, discrimination between position-dependent codes and context-sensitive codes, and generalization of the results of matching tasks from strings of letters to long-term memory for triples of words. Data from these experiments constrain the kinds of models that can be developed to account for matching and order, and present problems for several current memory models. Including connectionist models. Suggestions are made for modifications of these models to account for the results from matching tasks.