Status of spatial location in auditory sensory memory: evidence from rapidly presented lists.

Letters presented rapidly to separate spatial locations were used to test the precategorical acoustic storage (PAS) model's assumptions that memory information can be stored and masked selectively at separate spatial locations in auditory space and that spatial location can act as a retrieval cue in PAS. The suffix effect was present at the end of the list, even at a presentation rate of six per second. The data from three other experiments suggested that spatial locations do not act as memory repositories and that spatial location cannot be used as a retrieval cue at fast rates of presentation.