Stimulus redundancy and immediate recall

Abstract

This study examined immediate recall in two stimulus prefix and two stimulus suffix conditions and in a condition that combined a prefix and suffix. Suffixes and the combination of a prefix with a suffix interfered more with recall overall than did prefixes. Performance in each of the conditions that included a prefix was significantly better overall than in appropriate control conditions, in which interference was augmented by a redundant element in recall. It was suggested that prefixes and suffixes lie operationally on a continuum and that their effects result from the subject's inability to dissociate the redundant element from the memory series. However, the location of redundancy imposes different processing requirements that differentially influence recall.

Perceptual organization masquerading as phonological storage: Further support for a perceptual-gestural view of short-term memory

“…That is, in terms of our framework of auditory perceptual organization, grouping by similarity partitions the prefixes from the list, restoring the status of the first list item as a boundary to the temporally extended object that is the to-be-remembered list. The result with multiple prefixes (Neisser et al, 1969) also allays concern that the effect of a prefix stems simply from an effect of increasing list length: here, increasing the list length to a length appreciably greater than would be the case with a single prefix, diminishes rather than augments the prefix effect (for a similar finding, see Jahnke et al, 1976).…”

“…We have argued that a prefix and suffix impact upon acoustic rather than phonological processes based on a large body of previous work (Crowder, 1971;Frankish & Turner, 1984;Frick, 1988;Greenberg & Engle, 1983;Greene, 1991;Jahnke et al, 1976;Morton et al, 1971;Neisser et al, 1969;see Nicholls & Jones, 2002a, for a detailed critique of research purporting to show that the suffix effect can be related to post-categorical and not just pre-categorical processes, e.g., Ayres, Jonides, Reitman, Egan, & Howard, 1979;Neath, Surprenant, & Crowder, 1993). Nevertheless, it would seem prudent to demonstrate the acoustic action of the prefix and suffix in the present context.…”

“…There is already evidence that this prefix effect is functionally similar in its action to the suffix effect (Jahnke, Nowaczyk, & Wozniak, 1976;Neisser, Hoenig, & Goldstein, 1969) and that it can be used, therefore, as a device to reveal the degree to which acoustic perceptual organization is responsible for the residual PSE found at primacy under suppression in Experiment 1. Several features of the action of a stimulus prefix reveal a resemblance between its action and that of a suffix.…”

The stimulus prefix is not irrelevant and is redundant in different ways

“…A second possibility is that output interference associated with the act of recall accounts, at least in part, for this difference (cf. Jahnke et al, 1976).…”

“…Dallett (1964) used completely correct recall as the dependent measure and found nonsignificantly poorer recall in the relevant than in the irrelevant prefix condition. A second study (Jahnke, Nowaczyk, & Wozniak, 1976) was designed to examine the effect of multiple affixes and used percentage correct recall as the dependent measure. In this case, significantly greater impairment in performance was found when the prefix was relevant than when it was irrelevant.…”