The role of rehearsal on the output order of immediate free recall of short and long lists.

Abstract

Participants tend to initiate immediate free recall (IFR) of short lists of words with the very first word on the list. Three experiments examined whether rehearsal is necessary for this recent finding. In Experiment 1, participants were presented with lists of between 2 and 12 words for IFR at a fast, medium, or slow rate, with and without articulatory suppression (AS). The tendency to initiate output with the first item for short lists (1) did not change greatly when presentation rate was increased from a medium to a fast rate under normal conditions, (2) was reduced but not eliminated by AS, and (3) was maintained at slower rates when rehearsal was allowed, but decreased at slower rates when rehearsal was prevented. In Experiment 2, the overt rehearsal methodology was used, and the tendency to initiate output with the first item for short lists was present even in the absence of overt rehearsal. Experiment 3 re-examined IFR under normal encoding conditions and replicated the main findings from the normal encoding conditions of Experiment 1 whilst using the presentation rates and list lengths of Experiment 2. We argue that rehearsal is not strictly necessary for the tendency to initiate recall with the first item under normal conditions, but rehearsal nevertheless contributes to this effect at slower rates. wordsKeywords: free recall, rehearsal, short-term memory, output order, list length 3 In the immediate free recall (IFR) task, participants are presented with a series of unrelated words, and at the end of the list they must try to recall as many of the list items as they can, in any order that they wish. When lists of around 10-40 words are presented, participants recall a greater proportion of the first few list items (an advantage known as the primacy effect), and a greater proportion of the last few list items (an advantage known as the recency effect), relative to the recall of the middle list items (e.g., Murdock, 1962;Roberts, 1972).Explanations of the recency effect are central to theories of IFR. Unitary accounts of IFR, which assume that the same memory processes are responsible for recall performance throughout the list, propose that later list items benefit from being more temporally distinct (e.g., Brown, Neath & Chater, 2007;Glenberg & Swanson, 1986), or benefit from greater contextual overlap between the context associated with the recency items and the context associated with the end of the list (e.g., Glenberg et al., 1980;Howard & Kahana, 2002;Polyn, Norman, & Kahana, 2009;Sederberg, Howard & Kahana, 2008;Tan & Ward, 2000). These accounts are well placed to explain the magnitude of recency effects across a range of inter-stimulus intervals and retention intervals (e.g., Baddeley & Hitch, 1977;Bjork & Whitten, 1974;Crowder, 1993;Nairne, Neath, Serra, & Byun, 1997).The recency effect in IFR was also central to early dual-store accounts of IFR. These accounts assumed that the recency effect reflected the direct output of the later list items from a limited-capacity short-term store (e...

First things first: Similar list length and output order effects for verbal and nonverbal stimuli.

“…In contrast, although verbal memory performance was greatly reduced by AS, the task remained possible, a result suggesting that verbal rehearsal augmented (but was not strictly necessary) for IFR (a result similar to Grenfell-Essam et al, 2013;and Spurgeon et al, 2014).…”

“…Rehearsal is often invoked to explain primacy effects within recency-based accounts of IFR (e.g., Tan & Ward, 2000), but Grenfell-Essam, Ward, and Tan (2013) have recently shown that the tendency to initiate recall with the first list item in short lists in IFR was unlikely to be mediated by rehearsal. They showed that doubling the presentation rate from 1 word / s to 2 words / s did not affect the probability of first recall data.…”

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

“…Ward et al (2010) argued that this finding may encourage greater theoretical integration between IFR and ISR (as championed by only a small subset of accounts; e.g., Anderson, Bothell, Lebiere, & Matessa, 1998;Brown, Chater & Neath, 2008;Brown, Neath, & Chater, 2007;Farrell, 2012;Grossberg & Pearson, 2008). They also argued that the finding is potentially problematic (without additional assumptions) for those recency-based accounts of IFR that are largely based on data from longer lists and that tend to assume (correctly for longer lists) that the most recent items will be the most highly accessible and most likely to be recalled first (e.g., Brown et al, 2007;Howard & Kahana, 2002;Tan & Ward, 2000;Ward, 2002).…”

The Hopkins Verbal Learning Test: an in-depth analysis of recall patterns

“…Recall is more likely to be initiated with the first word in the list for high frequency words, but towards the end of the list for low frequency words (Sumby, 1963). Grenfell-Essam and colleagues have shown that where recall is initiated has a large effect on primacy and recency (Grenfell-Essam & Ward, 2012Grenfell-Essam et al, 2013, 2017Ward et al, 2010).…”

“…The first author's previous work, looking at the recall patterns in two other immediate memory tasks (immediate free recall and immediate serial recall), has shown how important in-depth analysis can be to advance a field (Grenfell-Essam & Ward, 2012Grenfell-Essam, Ward & Tan, 2013, 2017Ward, Tan & Grenfell-Essam, 2010). We hope that a deeper exploration of the recall patterns of controls and dementia cases within the HVLT may help improve its diagnostic efficacy.…”