The effects of rehearsal on temporal order coding

It has been claimed that temporal order information is encoded automatically. This claim has not been uniformly supported by experimentation that has included tests of several criteria suggested for identifying automatic processes. The present experiment extends these tests to a case in which temporal order judgments were obtained in a rehearsal task with massed presentation. In this task, temporal order coding was sensitive to strategy manipulations. In fact, in one condition there was no reliable evidence of any temporal order coding. These results contradict the claim that temporal order coding is automatic.