Free recall is a basic paradigm that has long been used to study human memory, and which was central to the verbal learning tradition in early cognitive psychology (e.g. Glanzer & Cunitz, 1966; Murdock, 1962; Postman & Phillips, 1965). In a free recall task, a subject is presented a list of to-be-remembered items, one at at time. For example, an experimenter might read a list of 20 words aloud, presenting a new word to the subject every 4 seconds. At the end of the presentation of the list, the subject is asked to recall the items (e.g., by writing down as many items from the list as possible). It is called a free recall task because the subject is free to recall the items in any order that he or she desires.The free recall task is of interest to cognitive science because it provided some of the basic information used to decompose the mental state term 'memory' into simpler subfunctions ('primary memory', 'secondary memory').

1. Serial Position Effect Experiment Pdf

This is because the results of a free recall task were typically plotted as a serial position curve. This curve exhibited a recency effect and a primacy effect. The behavior of these two effects provided support to the hypothesis that the free recall task called upon both a short-term and a long-term memory.References:.

Serial Position Effect Experiment Pdf

Glanzer, M., & Cunitz, A. Two storage mechanisms in free recall. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 5(4), 351-360. Murdock, BB (1962). 'The serial position effect of free recall'. Psychological Review, 65, 482–488.

Postman, L., & Phillips, L. Short-term temporal changes in free recall. Quarterly journal of experimental psychology, 17, 132-138.(Revised April 2010).

The finding that recency effects can occur not only in immediate free recall (i.e., short-term recency) but also in the continuous-distractor task (i.e., long-term recency) has led many theorists to reject the distinction between short- and long-term memory stores. Recently, we have argued that long-term recency effects do not undermine the concept of a short-term store, and we have presented a neurocomputational model that accounts for both short- and long-term recency and for a series of dissociations between these two effects. Here, we present a new dissociation between short- and long-term recency based on semantic similarity, which is predicted by our model. This dissociation is due to the mutual support between associated items in the short-term store, which takes place in immediate free recall and delayed free recall but not in continuous-distractor free recall.