Achievement

Processing the order of elements in a sequence is central to many aspects of cognition, especially language. Is order processing domain-specific? Building on prior work with core faculty Michael McCloskey and Brenda Rapp, in which he developed statistical analysis tools for investigating the system used to represent the order of elements in any type of sequence, trainee Simon Fischer-Baum conducted experiments testing how order is represented in: sequences of locations; spelling in unimpaired subjects; lists of words; and reading. In all cases, perseveration errors (items incorrectly inserted into a response that were correctly produced in a previous response) were likely to appear in the same position of the error and source responses, and the type of position that they maintained appears to be the same -- distance to both the left- and the right-edge. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis of a domain-general order processing system in cognition.