The resilience of verbal sequence learning: Evidence from the Hebb repetition effect.

In a single large-scale study, we demonstrate that verbal sequence learning as studied using the classic Hebb repetition effect (Hebb, 1961)-the improvement in the serial recall of a repeating sequence compared to nonrepeated sequences-is resilient to both wide and irregular spacing between sequence repetitions. Learning of a repeated sequence of letters was evident to a comparable degree with three, five, and eight intervening nonrepeated sequences and regardless of whether the spacing between repetitions was regular or irregular. Importantly, this resilience of verbal sequence learning was observed despite complete item-set overlap between repeated and nonrepeated sequences.

P300 event-related potential as an indicator of inattentional deafness?

An analysis of airplane accidents reveals that pilots sometimes purely fail to react to critical auditory alerts. This inability of an auditory stimulus to reach consciousness has been coined under the term of inattentional deafness. Recent data from literature tends to show that tasks involving high cognitive load consume most of the attentional capacities, leaving little or none remaining for processing any unexpected information.