The Basis and Implications of the Restoration of a Recency Effect in Immediate Serial Recall

Abstract

When a spoken presentation of a supra-span sequence of to-be-remembered (TBR) items is followed immediately by a similarly-spoken non-TBR item (stimulus suffix) the typical salience of the terminal item in recall is almost destroyed. However, Salter (1975) observed restoration of salience when pre-terminal and terminal TBR items differed in category membership. Five experiments are reported which aimed to clarify the basis and locus of Salter's effect. Survival of salience for the heterogeneous item was found under the following conditions: with the occurrence of the item unpredictable from trial-to-trial (Experiment I); with enforced processing of the suffix (Experiment II); with performance of a secondary task during list presentation (Experiment III); with the requirement to retain both the location and identity of the item (Experiment IV); and with the item as the terminal member of a non-suffixed visual list (Experiment V). It is argued that the effect has a postcategorical locus, and that its origin is not in better registration (mediated by selective attention), but, rather, in the enhancement of retrieval (mediated by access to distinctive information encoded during presentation). It is suggested that the latter hypothesis may have wide application in accounting for many kinds of salience.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Anderson

J. R.

Bower

G. H.

(1973). Human Associative Memory Washington, D.C.: V. H. Winston and Sons.

Crowder

R. G.

(1967). Prefix effect in immediate memory. Canadian Journal of Psychology 21, 450–61.

Crowder

R. G.

(1971). Waiting for the stimulus suffix: decay, delay, rhythm, and readout in immediate memory. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 23, 324–40.

Crowder

R. G.

(1973). Representation of speech sounds in precategorical acoustic storage. Journal of Experimental Psychology 98, 14–24.

Crowder

R. G.

(1976). Principles of Learning and Memory Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Crowder

R. G.

Morton

(1969). Precategorical acoustic storage (PAS). Perception and Psychophysics 5, 365–73.

Dallett

K. M.

(1965). “Primary memory”: the effects of redundancy upon digit repetition. Psychonomic Science 3, 237–8.

Darwin

C. J.

Baddeley

A. D.

(1974). Acoustic memory and the perception of speech. Cognitive Psychology 6, 41–60.

Fliess

J. L.

(1973). Statistical Methods for Rates and Proportions London: Wiley.

10.

Frankish

C. R.

(1975). Organisational Processes in Short-term Memory Unpublished Doctoral dissertation, University of Cambridge.

11.

Gardiner

J. M.

Craik

F. I. M.

Birtwistle

(1972). Retrieval cues and release from proactive inhibition. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 11, 778–83.

12.

Hintzman

D. L.

(1972). On testing the independence of associations. Psychological Review 79, 261–4.

13.

Kahneman

(1973). Attention and Effort Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc.

14.

Kirk

R. E.

(1968). Experimental Design: Procedures for the Behavioural Sciences Belmont, California: Brooks/Cole Publishing Co.

15.

Martin

Greeno

J. G.

(1972). Independence of associations tested: A reply to D. L. Hintzman. Psychological Review 79, 265–7.

16.

Morton

(1968). Selective interference in immediate recall. Psychonomic Science 12, 75–6.

17.

Morton

(1970). A functional model for memory. In Norman

D. A.

(Ed.), Models of Human Memory New York: Academic Press.

18.

Morton

Crowder

R. G.

Prussin

H. A.

(1971). Experiments with the stimulus suffix effect. Journal of Experimental Psychology Monograph 91, 169–90.

19.

Murray

D. J.

(1967). The role of speech responses in short-term memory. Canadian Journal of Psychology 21, 263–76.

20.

Routh

D. A.

(1970). “Trace strength”, modality, and the serial position curve in immediate memory. Psychonomic Science 18, 355–7.

21.

Routh

D. A.

(1971). Independence of the modality effect and amount of silent rehearsal in immediate serial recall. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 10, 213–8.

22.

Routh

D. A.

Lifschutz

A. J.

(1975). An asymmetrical effect of similarity in the attenuation and stimulus suffix interference. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 14, 95–104.

23.

Routh

D. A.

Mayes

J. T.

(1974). On consolidation and the potency of delayed stimulus suffixes. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 26, 472–9.

24.

Ryan

(1969). Grouping and short-term memory: different means and patterns of grouping. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 21, 137–47.

25.

Salter

(1975). Maintaining recency despite a stimulus suffix. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 27, 433–43.

26.

Salter

Osler

(1978). Residual effects in recall after a stimulus suffix. British Journal of Psychology 69, (in press).

27.

Tulving

(1976). Ecphoric processes in recall and recognition. In Brown

(Ed.), Recall and Recognition London: Wiley.

28.

Tulving

Madigan

S. A.

(1970). Memory and verbal learning. In Mussen

P. H.

Rosenzweig

M. R.

(Eds), Annual Review of Psychology Palo Alto: Annual Reviews Inc. 21.

29.

Watkins

M. J.

Watkins

O. C.

(1976). Cue-overload theory and the method of interpolated attributes. Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society 7, 289–91.

30.

Wickens

D. D.

(1972). Characteristics of word encoding. In Melton

A. W.

Martin

(Eds), Coding Processes in Human Memory London: John Wiley and Sons Ltd.