title: Why do participants initiate free recall of short lists of words with the first list item? Toward a general episodic memory explanation.
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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Essex.
authors.forename: Jessica
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Spurgeon
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Essex.
authors.forename: Geoff
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Ward
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Essex.
authors.forename: William J
authors.initials: WJ
authors.lastname: Matthews
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D006801:Humans; D061212:Memory, Episodic; D008570:Memory, Short-Term; D011939:Mental Recall; D008960:Models, Psychological; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D011336:Probability; D011581:Psychological Tests; D012691:Serial Learning; D013060:Speech; D013067:Speech Perception; D013995:Time