Serial position functions in general knowledge.

Abstract

Serial position functions with marked primacy and recency effects are ubiquitous in episodic memory tasks. The demonstrations reported here explored whether bow-shaped serial position functions would be observed when people ordered exemplars from various categories along a specified dimension. The categories and dimensions were: actors and age; animals and weight; basketball players and height; countries and area; and planets and diameter. In all cases, a serial position function was observed: People were more accurate to order the youngest and oldest actors, the lightest and heaviest animals, the shortest and tallest basketball players, the smallest and largest countries, and the smallest and largest planets, relative to intermediate items. The results support an explanation of serial position functions based on relative distinctiveness which predicts that serial position functions will be observed whenever a set of items can be sensibly ordered along a particular dimension. The serial position function arises because the first and last items enjoy a benefit of having no competitors on one side and therefore have enhanced distinctiveness relative to mid-dimension items, which suffer by having many competitors on both sides.

Modality-specific forgetting

“…A fundamental assumption of human memory is that memory representations interact (e.g., Schlichting & Preston, 2015). This is supported, for example, in demonstrations of interference (Kelley, Neath, & Surprenant, 2015;Konkle, Brady, Alvarez, & Oliva, 2010a, 2010bKoutstaal & Schacter, 1997;Raaijmakers & Jakab, 2013a, 2013bUnderwood, 1957). Access-based forgetting (i.e., recognition-and retrieval-induced forgetting) shows that this interaction in memory has a very particular form in which the distance of the memory representations in psychological space determines whether they interact (Anderson, Bjork, & Bjork, 1994;Maxcey & Woodman, 2014).…”

Remembering the Leaders of China

“…In recent years, however, psychologists have begun to apply quantitative and statistical techniques to probe collective memory (e.g., Overstreet and Healy, 2011 ; Kelley et al, 2013 , 2015 ; Rubin, 2014 ; Zaromb et al, 2014 ; Roediger and DeSoto, in press ). The studies reported in this burgeoning literature have begun to reveal knowledge about the psychological mechanisms underlying collective memory.…”

“…Items presented at the beginning of a list of to-be-learned materials as well as those presented at the end are usually recalled with significantly higher probabilities than those in the middle (these are called primacy effects and recency effects, respectively; e.g., Murdock, 1962 ). Recent quantitative studies on collective memory have shown some evidence indicating that the collective memory of a group of individuals for a series of items, including lyrics, famous books and movies, and political figures, also follow this function ( Overstreet and Healy, 2011 ; Kelley et al, 2013 , 2015 ; Roediger and DeSoto, 2014 ).…”

Now you make false memories; now you do not: the order of presentation of words in DRM lists influences the production of the critical lure in Alzheimer’s disease

“…However, this interpretation in terms of short-term and long-term episodic memories has been challenged, since studies have shown that serial position effects can occur in semantic memory with items arranged along a specific dimension (e.g., position, size, height, etc.). Alternative explanations based on the distinctiveness of the items have been suggested, in which the first and last items of a list are more distinctive than mid-list items (Kelley, Neath, & Surprenant, 2015).…”