Negative recency effects in delayed recognition: Spacing, consolidation, and retrieval strategy processes

Abstract

While items learned immediately before testing are generally remembered better than prior items in a study list, in delayed testing this relationship is reversed, yielding a negative recency effect. To adjudicate between the strategic rehearsal and spacing accounts of this phenomenon, we examined performance of 169 participants on a delayed recognition test following multiple sessions requiring the study and immediate free recall testing of 16 lists of 16 words. This revealed a strong effect of the amount of spacing between initial study position and initial free recall position on the degree of negative recency, supporting the spacing account. Furthermore, these spacing effects were nonmonotonic, suggesting that they are mediated by consolidation processes. Additional analyses indicate that strategies and rehearsal opportunities may also contribute to the effects of within-list encoding position on subsequent long-term memory, but for recall more than for recognition.

The Penn Electrophysiology of Encoding and Retrieval Study.

“…As further support for their interpretation, Kuhn et al (2018) found greater evidence of negative recency in earlier than later output positions of the delayed free recall (DFR) and continual-distractor free recall (CDFR) conditions of PEERS Experiment 2. Reanalyzing PEERS data, Sheaffer and Levy (2022) found analogous results of spacing on negative recency in the final recognition data.…”

“…The strongest endorsement of our approach derives from other investigators using PEERS data to answer their own questions. We have begun to see this happen (Madan, 2021;Naim et al, 2019;Osth & Farrell, 2019;Popov & Reder, 2020;Romani et al, 2016;Sheaffer & Levy, 2022;Zhang et al, 2023) and hope that this article, in synthesizing key motivations, methods, and discoveries, will prompt additional investigators to consider the value of this approach. may suggest that age differences in the dynamics of neural activity across an encoding period reflect changes in cognitive processing that compensate for age-related decline.…”

Neural correlates of memory in a naturalistic spatiotemporal context

“…In cumulative free recall, subjects attempted to recall all delivered items across the five preceding delivery days (this is analogous to the classic final-free recall procedure of Craik (1970), however, since subjects performed two testing blocks separated by a 10 minute break within one session, we describe each period as cumulative recall rather than final-free recall). Because recalling an item acts as an additional learning event (Kuhn, Lohnas, & Kahana, 2018; Sheaffer & Levy, 2022), sorting encoding events based on performance of these secondary memory tasks (for EEG analyses) would be confounded by output encoding effects. Below, we report behavioral findings from cumulative free recall conditional on an item’s recall history on the prior immediate free recall and cued recall tasks.…”