When participants are asked to recall a short list of words in any order that they like, they tend to initiate recall with the first list item and proceed in forward order, even when this is not a task requirement. The current research examined whether this tendency might be influenced by varying the number of items that are to be recalled. In 3…

Henson (1996) provided a number of demonstrations of error patterns in serial recall that contradict chaining models. One such error pattern concerned when participants make intrusions from prior lists: Rather than originating from random positions in the prior list, intrusions tend to be recalled in the same position as their position in the…

Serial position functions with marked primacy and recency effects are ubiquitous in episodic memory tasks. The demonstrations reported here explored whether bow-shaped serial position functions would be observed when people ordered exemplars from various categories along a specified dimension. The categories and dimensions were: actors and age;…

Remembering the order of a sequence of events is a fundamental feature of episodic memory. Indeed, a number of formal models represent temporal context as part of the memory system, and memory for order has been researched extensively. Yet, the nature of the code(s) underlying sequence memory is still relatively unknown. Across 4 experiments that…

Serial ordering mechanisms have been investigated extensively in psychology and psycholinguistics. It has also been demonstrated repeatedly that long-term phonological knowledge contributes to serial ordering. However, the mechanisms that contribute to serial ordering have yet to be fully understood. To understand these mechanisms, we demonstrate…

The law of prior entry states that attended objects come to consciousness more quickly than unattended ones. This has been well established in spatial cueing paradigms, where two task-relevant stimuli are presented near-simultaneously at two different locations. Here, we suggest that prior entry also plays a pivotal role in temporal attention…

The mechanisms underlying the poorer serial recall of talker-variable lists (e.g., alternating female-male voices) as compared with single-voice lists were examined. We tested the novel hypothesis that this "talker variability effect" arises from the tendency for perceptual organization to partition the list into streams based on voice…