Conditional recall and the frequency effect in the serial recall task: an examination of item-to-item associativity (original) (raw)
Related papers
2003
Three experiments investigate the effects of mixing items of different types in the same list. Experiments 1 and 2 compare the immediate serial recall of high-and low-frequency words in pure and alternating lists. In pure lists highfrequency words are better recalled, but in alternating lists the two types of words are recalled at intermediate, and identical, levels. Experiment 3 compares the recall of words and nonwords. In pure lists nonwords are recalled substantially less well than words. In alternating lists nonwords gain a substantial recall advantage compared to pure lists but are still less well recalled than words, which are recalled at identical levels in both mixed and alternating lists. The results refute item-based redintegration accounts of frequency effects in immediate serial recall and provide evidence for the importance of inter-item associative mechanisms.
Serial recall, word frequency, and mixed lists: The influence of item arrangement
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2012
Studies of the effect of word frequency in the serial recall task show that lists of high-frequency words are better recalled than lists of low-frequency words; however, when high-and low-frequency words are alternated within a list, there is no difference in the level of recall for the two types of words, and recall is intermediate between lists of pure frequency. This pattern has been argued to arise from the development of a network of activated long-term representations of list items that support the redintegration of all list items in a nondirectional and nonspecific way. More recently, it has been proposed that the frequency effect might be a product of the coarticulation of items at word boundaries and their influence on rehearsal rather than a consequence of memory representations. The current work examines recall performance in mixed lists of an equal number of high-and low-frequency items arranged in contiguous segments (i.e., HHHLLL and LLLHHH), under quiet and articulatory suppression conditions, to test whether the effect is (a) nondirectional and (b) dependent on articulatory processes. These experiments demonstrate that neither explanation is satisfactory, although the results suggest that the effect is mnemonic. A language-based approach to short-term memory is favored with emphasis on the role of speech production processes at output.
In immediate serial recall tasks, high-frequency words are recalled better than low-frequency words. This has been attributed to high-frequency words being better represented and providing more effective support to a redintegration process at retrieval (C. Hulme et al., 1997). In studies of free recall, there is evidence that frequency of word co-occurrence, rather than word frequency per se, may explain the recall advantage enjoyed by high-frequency words (J. Deese, 1960). The authors present evidence that pre-exposing pairs of low-frequency words, so as to create associative links between them, has substantial beneficial effects on immediate serial recall performance. These benefits, which are not attributable to simple familiarization with the words per se, do not occur for high-frequency words. These findings indicate that associative links between items in long-term memory have important effects on short-term memory performance and suggest that the effects of word frequency in short-term memory tasks are related to differences in inter-item associations in long-term memory.
The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2006
Previous studies have reported that, in contrast to the effect on immediate serial recall, lexical/ semantic factors have little effect on immediate serial recognition. This has been taken as evidence that linguistic knowledge contributes to verbal short-term memory in a redintegrative process at recall. Contrary to this view, we found that lexicality, frequency, and imageability all influenced matching span. The standard matching span task, requiring changes in item order to be detected, was less susceptible to lexical/semantic factors than was a novel task involving the detection of phoneme order and hence item identity changes. Therefore, in both immediate recognition and immediate serial recall, lexical/semantic knowledge makes a greater contribution to item identity than to item order memory. Task sensitivity, and not the absence of overt recall, may have underpinned previous failures to show effects of these variables in immediate recognition. We also compared matching span for pure and unpredictable mixed lists of words and nonwords. Lexicality had a larger impact on immediate recognition for pure than for mixed lists, in line with findings for immediate serial recall. List composition affected the detection of phoneme but not item order changes in matching span; similarly, in recall, mixed lists produce more frequent word phoneme migrations but not migrations of entire items. These results point to strong similarities between immediate serial recall and recognition. Lexical/semantic knowledge may contribute to phonological stability in both tasks.
The word frequency effect in short-term serial recall
2010
Recent research into the nature of the frequency effect in immediate serial recall has revealed that some aspects of the mnemonic influence of word frequency over the short-term are not well accommodated by current explanations of the effect (i.e. item-based redintegration). In particular, the finding that how well a word is recalled is dependent on the relationship between that word’s
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 2010
In four experiments, participants were presented with lists of between 1 and 15 words for tests of immediate memory. In each experiment, participants tended to initiate recall with the first word on the list for short lists, but as the list length was increased so there was a decreased tendency to start with the first list item; and, when free to do so, participants showed an increased tendency to start with one of the last four list items. In all conditions, the start position strongly influenced the shape of the resultant serial position curves: when recall started at serial position 1, elevated recall of early list items was observed; when recall started towards the end of the list, there were extended recency effects. These results occurred under free recall, and different variants of immediate serial recall (ISR) and reconstruction of order tasks. We argue that these findings have implications for the relationship between recall and rehearsal and free recall and ISR.
Previous Experimental Results : Multiple-Presentation List Recall
2015
Associative learning is an important part of human cognition, and is thought to play key role in list learning. We present here an account of associative learning that learns asymmetric itemto-item associations, strengthening or weakening associations over time with repeated exposures. This account, combined with an existing account of activation strengthening and decay, predicts the complicated results of a multi-trial free and serial recall task, including asymmetric contiguity effects that strengthen over time (Klein, Addis, & Kahana, 2005).
List and Text Recall Differ in Their Predictors: Replication Over Samples and Time
The Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, 2010
Lthough episodic recall is generally thought to decline with advancing age, regardless of the nature of the materials to be remembered (e.g., Zacks, hasher, & Li, 2000), recent work suggests that different mechanisms may be associated with particular recall tasks (Siedlecki, 2007). Studies training memory in older adults have failed to show transfer: Deployment of specific resources and abilities may be required depending on the task (see, e.g., Rebok, Carlson, & Langbaum, 2007). Models of broad memory factors may therefore not adequately distinguish sources of age and individual differences in specific remembering activities. Although list and text recall have been considered to be part of a latent verbal memory construct (e.g., van der Linden et al., 1999) and may be treated as markers of a higher order memory factor (e.g., hertzog, Dixon, hultsch, & MacDonald, 2003), including list and text recall in a single latent variable permits only the common memory variance from these tasks to be predicted. however, list recall shows larger average age declines than text recall when scores are identically calibrated with Rasch scaling (Zelinski & Kennison, 2007). List recall may decline more than text recall because it is more affected by age effects on fluid-like abilities or resources, such as speed or working memory, whereas text recall may be less affected by aging because fluid-like deficits are balanced by stability in crystallized-like abilities, such as vocabulary (see, e.g., Stine-Morrow, Miller, gagne, & hertzog, 2008, but see Johnson, 2003). Another reason why list and text recall should be examined separately is that recall of unrelated words and of discourse very likely involves different encoding and retrieval processes (e.g., Jefferies, Lambon Ralph, & Baddeley, 2004). Word list recall entails encoding and retrieving contextual and semantic item information. Light (1992) suggested that age deficits in list recall occur because of