This is the accepted version of the paper.This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. The overall aim of this research is to promote greater theoretical integration between two highly important and widely-used tests of immediate memory: immediate serial recall (ISR) and immediate free recall. The main claim of the paper is that greater theoretical integration between these tasks can be achieved, if only researchers understood fully the effects of increasing list length on both tasks. To this end, we report the data from four experiments looking at the effects of increasing list length on the output order and serial position curves for the immediate free recall task, and the ISR task and its variants.
Permanent repository linkAt first glance, one might think that there should be no need to promote greater theoretical integration between ISR and free recall. On the face of it, the methodologies of the two immediate memory tests are remarkably similar: in both tasks, participants are presented with a sequence of items and at the end of the list they must try to recall as many items as possible, in either the same order as that presented (ISR) or in any order (free recall). In addition, both tasks share a common theoretical heritage. Both tasks have provided empirical evidence taken as key 'signature findings' supporting the establishment of a short-term memory store (STS) of limited capacity: in ISR, the memory span limitation has been taken to reflect the limited capacity of verbal STS (whether this be measured in items, chunks, or time, e.g., Baddeley, 1986; Miller, 1956) and the advantage in recall of the last items known as the recency effect in free recall has also been taken as evidence for the direct output of items at test from a short-term buffer store (e.g., Atkinson & Shiffrin, 1971;Glanzer, 1972) It is therefore perhaps surprising that most current theories of ISR do not provide a detailed account of free recall. For example, currently influential accounts of ISR include: the phonological loop model of working memory