The ranschburg effect: Tests of the guessing-bias and proactive interference hypotheses

Walsh, Michael F.; Schwartz, Marian

doi:10.1016/s0022-5371(77)80007-8

Cited by 6 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…EXPERIMENT 1 Walsh and Schwartz (1977) did not find that guessing instructions significantly influenced the Ranschburg effect. However, one may doubt the conclusiveness of their findings.…”

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confidence: 76%

“…There was no group given neutral instructions regarding guessing, largely because it was not clear how such instructionscould be implemented given the procedure used here. Walsh and Schwartz (1977) did use a neutral-instructions group and found that this group fell into an intermediate position between the guessing and the no-guessing groups.…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The only study directly manipulating guessing found inconclusive results. Walsh and Schwartz (1977) gave instructions to their subjects that either encouraged guessing, discouraged guessing, or were neutral. There was no significant difference in the magnitude of the Ranschburg effect in these groups, although there was a slight trend for a larger effect in the group that was encouraged to guess.…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Experiment 1 used another form of the instructional manipulation of guessing employed by Walsh and Schwartz (1977). This manipulation was found to have a significant influence…”

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confidence: 99%

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The Ranschburg effect: The role of guessing strategies

Greene

1991

Memory & Cognition

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The Ranschburg effect refers to the finding of impaired serial recall of items repeated on a list. One account attributes this effect to the use of a strategy where subjects avoid using as guesses stimuli that they had recalled elsewhere on the list. Support for this interpretation is reported here. The Ranschburg effect is eliminated when subjects are instructed to avoid guessing. Also, the Ranschburg effect is found in partial report only when subjects are told that the crucial item occurred elsewhere on the list.Immediate serial recall of a list of items is impaired when an item is repeated on a list. This phenomenon, known as the Ranschburg effect, was introduced into the modem memory literature by Crowder and Melton (1965). Two important qualifications are that only recall of the second occurrence of a repeated item is generally impaired and that this effect is typically found only when one or more other items intervene between the two occurrences of a repeated stimulus (Crowder, 1968a). Thus, the Ranschburg effect violates two established principles of memory-namely, that repetition improves memory and that the beneficial effects of repetition improve as a function of spacing.Two approaches have generally been taken to explain this phenomenon. The first stresses the importance of output interference in memory. This approach claims that the emission of a stimulus as a response somehow makes a second occurrence of that stimulus harder to retrieve. There are several findings supporting the role of output processes. For example, although recall of the second occurrence is impaired when subjects recall a list of items in typical forward fashion, recall of the first occurrence may be impaired when subjects recall a list in backward order (Jahnke, 1969). No Ranschburg effect is found when subjects are given memory tests that do not require emission of an item twice, such as list recognition (Wolf & Jahnke, 1968) or probed recall of single items (Jahnke, 1970). Also, Ranschburg effects may be caused by response prefixes; when subjects have to emit a stimulus before recall, they are more likely to make errors if that stimulus also occurs on the list (Crowder, 1968b).A second approach does not deny the importance of output processes in this effect but claims that this is not truly a memory phenomenon at all. Rather, the Ranschburg effect is interpreted as a result of the guessing strategies that a subject follows when he/she is unable to remember

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“…EXPERIMENT 1 Walsh and Schwartz (1977) did not find that guessing instructions significantly influenced the Ranschburg effect. However, one may doubt the conclusiveness of their findings.…”

mentioning

confidence: 76%

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Experiment 1 used another form of the instructional manipulation of guessing employed by Walsh and Schwartz (1977). This manipulation was found to have a significant influence…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Ranschburg effect: The role of guessing strategies

Greene

1991

Memory & Cognition

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“…documented (e.g., Crowder, 1968;Crowder & Melton, 1965;Greene, 1991;Henson, 1998;Hinrichs, Mewaldt, & Redding, 1973;Jahnke, 1969aJahnke, , 1969bJahnke, , 1970Jahnke, , 1972Jahnke, , 1974Walsh & Schwartz, 1977). In these experiments, participants studied lists of items (usually letters or digits) in which either a single item was repeated (e.g., KLBXDBT) or all items were unique (e.g., KLBXDNT).…”

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confidence: 99%

Interresponse times in serial recall: Effects of intraserial repetition.

Kahana¹,

Jacobs²

2000

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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The authors examined the effects of intraserial repetition on multitrial serial learning of random consonant lists, analyzing both learning rates and perfect trial inten-esponse times (IRTs). Lists varied along 3 dimensions: list length, presence or absence of a repeated element, and lag between repeated elements. After achieving a forward-recall criterion on a given list, participants (N = 20) attempted backward recall. At small lags, IRTs between the repeated elements were very short (compared with IRTs from identical positions in nonrepetition lists). At larger lags, the IRT to recall the second repeated item was substantially longer than in control lists. These results reveal a latency analogue of the Ranschburg pattern seen in accuracy data. A Ranschburg pattern was also found in participants' learning rates. These results both generalize the Ranschburg phenomenon and present further challenges to theories of serial order memory.

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Interresponse times in serial recall: Effects of intraserial repetition.

Kahana¹,

Jacobs²

2000

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cogni

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The ranschburg effect: Tests of the guessing-bias and proactive interference hypotheses

Cited by 6 publications

References 11 publications

The Ranschburg effect: The role of guessing strategies

The Ranschburg effect: The role of guessing strategies

Interresponse times in serial recall: Effects of intraserial repetition.

Interresponse times in serial recall: Effects of intraserial repetition.

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