Spurgeon Jessica, Ward Geoff, Matthews William J
Department of Psychology, University of Essex.
J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2014 Nov;40(6):1551-67. doi: 10.1037/xlm0000028. Epub 2014 Jun 16.
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.
面对用于即时自由回忆（IFR）的简短单词列表的参与者，表现出一种强烈的倾向，即从列表的第一个项目开始回忆，然后按顺序依次进行。我们报告了两项实验，研究这种倾向是否由一种短期记忆存储所支撑，这种短期记忆存储被一些人认为是IFR中近因效应的基础。在实验1中，我们向三组参与者呈现了包含2到12个单词的列表，用于即时自由回忆、延迟自由回忆和连续分心自由回忆。需要记忆的单词同时通过语音和视觉呈现，分心任务包括默默解决一系列自行节奏的、视觉呈现的数学方程（例如，3 + 2 + 4 = ？）。在短列表开始时开始回忆的倾向在即时自由回忆中最为明显，但在其他两种回忆条件中也存在。这一发现在实验2中得到了重复，在实验2中，需要记忆的项目以无声视觉方式呈现，参与者大声说出他们对计算机节奏数学方程的答案。我们的结果表明，短期缓冲不能完全解释从短列表开头开始回忆的倾向；相反，它们表明这种倾向代表了情景记忆的一种普遍属性，这种属性在一系列时间尺度上都会出现。
