Stimulus and response prefixes interfere differentially with short-term recall.

Abstract

The present experiment contrasted the effects of one and three redundant elements on recall, when the elements prefixed either the stimulus or the response. Recall was the same when a single redundant element was included in the presentation of the stimulus and when it was required in response. Relative to this level, recall improved slightly when three redundant elements were included in the stimulus and was degraded significantly when the three were required in response. These results were taken to indicate that both stimulus and response prefixes contribute to the load on memory, but that the mechanisms whereby this occurs are different. The relations of the stimulus and response prefix to the stimulus and response suffix were also considered.

The effect of selective attention and a stimulus prefix on the output order of immediate free recall of short and long lists.

“…Finally, we note that the prefix appeared to affect recall only in the primacy portion of the serial position curves, which is in contrast to previous findings that the prefix acts to depress recall fairly evenly across the whole curve, such that the prefix serial position curve is parallel but below the unprefixed curve (Jahnke, Nowaczyk, & Wozniak, 1976;Jahnke & Perez, 1981;Mills & Martin, 1977). We posit that the use of IFR rather than ISR caused this difference.…”

Order of report and the structure of temporary memory.

“…of Martin (1978Martin ( , 1980, others have looked at the effects of emitting one or more "prefix" items before report of the to-be-recalled material (Conrad, 1958(Conrad, , 1960Crowder, 1967;Dallett, 1964;Jahnke, 1975;Jahnke & Nowaczyk, 1977). By adapting that paradigm, it is possible to vary the familiarity of the prefix, and so to contrast disruption due to production with problems of assembly.…”

Processing demand and short-term memory: The response-prefix effect.

“…With the nominal memory series held constant, the effect of a response prefix has been found to increase with increases in phonic and formal similarity (Crowder, 1969;Shumaker, 1971), with a larger number of prefix elements (Jahnke, 1975), and, in the present study, with the active retrieval of the prefix from memory, including the increased size of the set of permissible pre-fixes in memory that must be searched, and the number and ordering of the cognitive operations required by the prefix (interpolated) task. These findings are consistent with the view that there is an active memory system whose limited capacity must be shared by the memory and prefix elements and the cognitive operations performed on them.…”

“…It is possible that the active memory system is small in size and that even a simple prefix can displace elements of the target series. Such a view suggests that the amount of interference is directly related to the number of response prefixes, and the finding that three elements in the response prefix degrade recall more than one (Jahnke, 1975) is consistent with such a position. On the other hand, such a displacement notion cannot handle without embellishment the finding that both phonic (Crowder, 1969) and formal similarity (Shumaker, 1971) modulate the size of the prefix effect.…”

“…In spite of these and other efforts (e.g., Crowder, 1969;Dallett, 1964;Shumaker, 1971), it is fair to say that the response-prefix effect has received relatively little attention and that the effect has not been successfully articulated with any existing theory of memory. Recently, however, the view has been advanced that the response-prefix effect is a manifestation of the processing limitations inherent in an active memory system (Jahnke, 1975;Jahnke & Nowaczyk, 1975). The retrieval and emission of the response prefix are presumed to add to an already burdened memory system, and forgetting occurs as a consequence.…”