Why Do Participants Initiate Free Recall of Short Lists of Words with the First List Item? Toward a General Episodic Memory Explanation

Autor/inn/en	Spurgeon, Jessica; Ward, Geoff; Matthews, William J.
Titel	Why Do Participants Initiate Free Recall of Short Lists of Words with the First List Item? Toward a General Episodic Memory Explanation
Quelle	In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40 (2014) 6, S.1551-1567 (17 Seiten) PDF als Volltext Verfügbarkeit
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	0278-7393
DOI	10.1037/xlm0000028
Schlagwörter	Recall (Psychology); Word Lists; Memory; College Students; Short Term Memory; Foreign Countries; United Kingdom (England) + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? Abberufung; Wortliste; Gedächtnis; Collegestudent; Kurzzeitgedächtnis; Ausland
Abstract	Participants who are presented with a short list of words for immediate free recall (IFR) show a strong tendency to initiate their recall with the 1st list item and then proceed in forward serial order. We report 2 experiments that examined whether this tendency was underpinned by a short-term memory store, of the type that is argued by some to underpin recency effects in IFR. In Experiment 1, we presented 3 groups of participants with lists of between 2 and 12 words for IFR, delayed free recall, and continuous-distractor free recall. The to-be-remembered words were simultaneously spoken and presented visually, and the distractor task involved silently solving a series of self-paced, visually presented mathematical equations (e.g., 3 + 2 + 4 = ?). The tendency to initiate recall at the start of short lists was greatest in IFR but was also present in the 2 other recall conditions. This finding was replicated in Experiment 2, where the to-be-remembered items were presented visually in silence and the participants spoke aloud their answers to computer-paced mathematical equations. Our results necessitate that a short-term buffer cannot be fully responsible for the tendency to initiate recall from the beginning of a short list; rather, they suggest that the tendency represents a general property of episodic memory that occurs across a range of time scales. (As Provided).
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Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2020/1/01