In three experiments using a single-trial, free-recall procedure, subjects were sometimes presented a forget cue during a list, meaning that they were not responsible for recalling any of the words which preceded it, only those which followed it. Since the primacy effect over the functional beginning of such lists was not diminished, the proactive…

The present study was designed to investigate the effects of stimulus presentation rate on recall and primacy-recency effects in children. Results indicated that the traditional interpretation of the primacy effect as reflecting long-term memory store may not be valid. (Author/SB)

Children's short-term memory was studied under two experimental conditions: one in which recall was expected to be facilitated because of the provision of a study period, and one in which a distracting task was imposed that was expected to interfere with recall. Forty subjects at each of two age levels, 7 and 11 years, were tested in a…

A system of precategorized acoustic storage has accounted for the recency effect obtained in the immediate serial recall of sequences of digits, consonants, or syllables. Four experiments in recall of word sequences investigated fit to this model. A system of postcategorical lexical storage was concluded to explain the results. (Author/RD)

This study examining children's ability to organize information for the purpose of recall was designed to control for verbal ability differences. The participants were 10 boys and 10 girls each from kindergarten, 2nd, 4th and 6th grades. A modified "Simon Says" game was used to enable the children to respond to eight selected verbal and motor…

Retarded subjects were compared with mental- and chronological-age matched controls on serial short-term memory (STM) tasks. Retarded subjects were inferior to the control groups on both primacy and recency items, under two recall conditions. These data are discussed in relation to possible mechanisms underlying IQ-related individual differences…