In an immediate serial recall task, participants are presented with a list of items that they must subsequently report back in the original presentation order. Although immediate serial recall has long been taken as the standard short-term and working memory task, a growing body of literature has instead made use of immediate serial recognition. In immediate serial recognition, a list of items is presented and subsequently represented, either in the exact same order or with two adjacent items swapped. Participants must decide whether the order of the list items was the same or different across the two presentations. Whereas serial recall and serial recognition are often treated as comparable tasks, with a few differences that make one or the other more suitable for a given experiment, the relationship between them has not been carefully examined. In this article, we report a series of experiments that directly compare the effects of various manipulations using the two tasks. In Experiments 1 and 2 we show an effect of word frequency in serial recall but not serial recognition. In Experiments 3 and 4 we show an effect of semantic relatedness in serial recall but not serial recognition. Experiments 5 and 6 demonstrate that the two tests are similarly affected by word concreteness and acoustic similarity, respectively. We consider the theoretical and methodological implications of these findings.

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Dynamic visual noise (DVN), an array of squares that randomly switch between black and white, interferes with certain tasks that involve visuo-spatial processing. Based on the assumption that the representation of concrete words includes an imagistic code whereas that of abstract words does not, Parker and Dagnall (2009) predicted that DVN should disrupt visual working memory and selectively interfere with memory for concrete words. They observed a reversal of the concreteness effect in both a delayed free recall and a delayed recognition test. In six studies, we partially replicate and extend their work. In Experiments 1 (delayed free recall) and 2 (delayed recognition), DVN abolished, but did not reverse, the concreteness effect. Experiments 3 and 4 found no effect of DVN on a prototypical working memory task, immediate serial recall: concreteness effects were observed in both the control and DVN conditions. In contrast, Experiment 5 showed that DVN abolished the concreteness effect in an immediate serial recognition test. In the final experiment, subjects did not know whether they would receive an immediate serial recall or an immediate serial recognition test until after the list had been presented. Nonetheless, DVN had no effect on immediate serial recall but once again eliminated the concreteness effect on immediate serial recognition. The results (1) extend the effects of DVN on the concreteness effect to working memory tasks, (2) suggest that immediate serial recall and immediate serial recognition are more different than similar, and (3) have implications for theories of DVN, the concreteness effect, and models of memory.

Studies of implicit learning often examine peoples' sensitivity to sequential structure. Computational accounts have evolved to reflect this bias. An experiment conducted by Neil and Higham [Neil, G. J., & Higham, P. A.(2012). Implicit learning of conjunctive rule sets: An alternative to artificial grammars. Consciousness and Cognition, 21, 1393-1400] points to limitations in the sequential approach. In the experiment, participants studied words selected according to a conjunctive rule. At test, participants discriminated rule-consistent from rule-violating words but could not verbalize the rule. Although the data elude explanation by sequential models, an exemplar model of implicit learning can explain them. To make the case, we simulate the full pattern of results by incorporating vector representations for the words used in the experiment, derived from the large-scale semantic space models LSA and BEAGLE, into an exemplar model of memory, MINERVA 2. We show that basic memory processes in a classic model of memory capture implicit learning of non-sequential rules, provided that stimuli are appropriately represented.

Words that sound dissimilar are recalled better than otherwise comparable words that sound similar on both immediate serial recall and immediate serial recognition tests, the so-called acoustic similarity effect. Although studies using immediate serial recall have shown an analogous visual similarity effect, in which words that look dissimilar are recalled better than words that look similar, this effect has not been examined in immediate serial recognition. We derived a prediction from the Feature Model that a visual similarity effect will be observed in immediate serial recognition only when the items are acoustically dissimilar; the model predicts no effect when the items are acoustically similar. Experiments 1 and 2 used visually dissimilar and visually similar stimuli that were all acoustically similar and replicated the visual similarity effect in serial recall but revealed no effect in serial recognition. Experiments 3 and 4 used a second set of stimuli that were acoustically dissimilar and found a visual similarity effect in both serial recall and serial recognition. The experiments confirm the Feature Model's predictions and add to earlier findings that the two tests, serial recall and serial recognition, may show quite different results because the two tests are not as similar as previously thought.