Distinctiveness and Very Short-term Serial Position Effects

The serial position function reflects better memory for the first and last few items in a list than for the middle items. Four experiments examined the effects of temporal spacing on the serial position function for five-item lists that took between 0.5 seconds and 1.1 seconds to present. As with recall of far longer-lasting lists, recency and other robust serial position effects were observed with both free and serial recall. We demonstrate that temporal schedules of presentation control recall probability in predictable ways, and conclude that very fleeting lists obey similar principles as do longer-lasting lists. We compare both sets of findings with predictions from the dimensional distinctiveness framework.