The effect of selective attention and a stimulus prefix on the output order of immediate free recall of short and long lists.

Abstract

Participants tend to initiate immediate free recall (IFR) of short lists of words with the first word in the list (Serial Position 1 [SP1]) and then proceed in forward serial order. Two potential explanations for this finding were examined: that the first items have increased selective attention (Experiment 1A and 1B) and enhanced temporal distinctiveness (Experiment 2) relative to subsequent list items. In Experiments 1A and 1B, participants were presented with lists of colored words for IFR. The experimental group was told that some trials would contain a red word and that when this occurred, they should output this word first in recall before recalling as many other words as they could. This instruction was designed to shift attention away from SP1 and toward the red item. The control group participants received identical stimuli but were unaware of the importance of the colored words and had no output order constraints. The overall recall of SP1 was not greatly affected in either experiment. In Experiment 2, participants were presented with lists containing between 2 and 12 words. Half of the trials contained a triple word stimulus prefix. For short lists in IFR, the overall recall of SP1 and the tendency to initiate recall with SP1 were reduced but far from eliminated by the stimulus prefix. We argue that our findings may be explained within a grouping interpretation in which the tendency to initiate recall with the first to-be-remembered item may reflect participants' tendency to output the first word in a highly salient participant-determined group.

Memory-based and online strategies in retrospective evaluations

“…This suggests that if memory is involved in evaluation, it cannot simply be characterized by general trends as there is too much variability within recall of individual sequences. This is consistent with ne-grained analyses of free recall data, which show that overall serial position functions are strongly dependent on the items with which recall is initiated (Grenfell-Essam & Ward, 2015), and that later recalls are strongly dependent on which items have already been recalled (Kahana, 1996;Laming, 1999;Spurgeon et al, 2014;Ward et al, 2010). In Experiment 3 we collected both memory and evaluation data on each trial.…”

“…Few studies have examined patterns of free recall of numbers (Dale & Baddeley, 1966), and by using numbers as stimuli we have been able to provide detailed analyses of the recall of such stimuli. Using standard manipulations from the free-recall literature our experiments indicate that recall patterns of numbers follow well-established patterns (Bjork & Whitten, 1974;Farrell, 2012;Grenfell-Essam & Ward, 2015;Postman & Phillips, 1965;Spurgeon et al, 2014;Stefanidi, Ellis, & Brewer, 2018;Ward et al, 2010), though with some quantitative exceptions. To summarize, in the rst two experiments we used techniques from the free recall literature to manipulate memory performance.…”

“…We used a list length of 6 and again collected either recall or evaluation data on each trial. In order to manipulate the shape of the serial position curve, one item on the list was always highlighted for rst recall (Grenfell-Essam & Ward, 2015). Participants were more likely to initiate recall with the highlighted item and we saw a strong e ect of the manipulation on both memory accuracy and recall.…”

“…The results here establish a potential link, but one caveat is that this e ect may be purely an attentional e ect. That is, asking people to prioritize a number for recall may lead people to selectively attend to that item at list presentation (Grenfell-Essam & Ward, 2015), and that greater attention may directly lead to the greater weighting of that item in evaluation, rather than indirectly a ecting evaluations via recall.…”

“…In these experiments, participants view two rapidly changing sequences of numbers, and one number is highlighted in a salient color. A similar technique has previously been used in memory experiments (Grenfell-Essam & Ward, 2015) to bias initial retrieval away from the rst item of a list toward a highlighted item from another position. We therefore investigated whether starting recall with items at di erent serial positions would also in uence evaluation.…”