Recency and the modality effect in immediate ordered recall.
In immediate ordered recall, recency is the improved recall of the last item of a presentation, and the modality effect is the advantage for an acoustic presentation over a subvocalized visual presentation, primarily occurring at the last serial position. Experiment 1 tested grouped presentations. There was a modality effect for the first item of the last group, even though that item was at the third-to-last or fourth-to-last serial position. In Experiment 2, for vocalized presentations of syllables ending in a, recency was larger for staccato speech than legato speech; for subvocalized presentations, there was a substantial recency for the legato style. In Experiment 3, recency was larger for a set of syllables ending in ATE than for a set of syllables ending in AME. These results suggest that recency cannot be explained by the existence of a fixed-capacity store, auxiliary to the auditory short-term store, that retains only some types of presentations. It is suggested instead that recency might reflect an auxiliary method of using the information in the auditory short-term store.
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D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D006801:Humans; D008570:Memory, Short-Term; D011939:Mental Recall; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D013060:Speech; D013997:Time Factors