Distinctiveness and priority in free recall of words

ABSTRACT

Participants recalled low- and high-priority words varying in distinctiveness in three experiments. Word priority was established by assigning point values based on font colour or conceptual category. Word distinctiveness varied across three list structures: homogeneous lists of words (same colour or category), 50/50 lists containing words in two font colours or from two categories, and isolation lists in which a word was isolated in serial position two either by colour (Experiments 1 and 2) or category (Experiment 3). Word priority was established before list presentation in Experiment 1 and after list presentation in Experiments 2 and 3. When colour priority was established before list presentation, participants recalled high-priority words better than low-priority words across all list structures. Early isolation enhanced recall for high-priority words but impaired recall for low-priority words. When colour priority was established after list presentation, neither priority nor distinctiveness enhanced recall. When category priority was established after list presentation, participants recalled high-priority words better than low-priority words, and isolation only enhanced recall when it was combined with high priority. We concluded that priority and distinctiveness combine to produce the early isolation effect, and that encoding and retrieval processes interact to enhance memory for high-priority and distinctive events.

KEYWORDS:

• Memory
• distinctiveness
• priority
• isolation effect
• value-directed memory

Acknowledgements

The following students (in alphabetical order) at Middle Tennessee State University assisted in designing the experiments, testing participants, and/or coding data: Angelina M. Anselmo, Sara E. Brown, Richard Buchli, Cuauhtemoc U. Gonzalez, Mekenzie Meadows, Melissa C. Millikan, Carl B. Nabors, Nina Thepmanivong, Aneeqa Thiele, and Tozia Ware. The authors also wish to thank Reed Hunt and Ian Neath for their comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The SPSS files, supplemental serial position analyses, and materials for all three experiments are available at https://doi.org/10.17632/zns2ppnxj4.2. None of the experiments were preregistered.

Notes

1 The serial position graphs for all three experiments are posted in the publicly-available Mendeley dataset for this series of experiments (https://doi.org/10.17632/zns2ppnxj4.2).

2 In the output-order t-tests in Experiments 1, 2 and 3, only participants who recalled items in both cells of the contrasts being reported were included. This led to different numbers of participants in each test.

3 We did not statistically compare output order for low-priority isolates and low-priority targets in the homogeneous lists in Experiment 1 because only nine participants recalled both items. In Experiment 3, 36 participants recalled both the low-priority isolates and the low-priority targets in the homogeneous lists, making a statistical comparison meaningful.

4 Note that the two isolation lists and the two 50/50 lists each contained two categories, whereas the two homogeneous lists each contained one category. Thus, each participant saw words from ten categories.