Memory strength and recency judgments

Two experiments were done to examine the effect of memory strength on numerical judgment of recency (JOR). In one experiment, the strong versus weak manipulation was defined by stimulus type (pictures vs. names); and in the other, it was defined by long versus short study durations of pictures. Two hypotheses were contrasted: (1) that strong items seem more recent than weak items (theactivation hypothesis), and (2) that JORs are more accurate for strong items than for weak items (theaccuracy hypothesis). Results of both experiments supported the activation hypothesis. On the basis of these and previous results, it is argued that recency is inferred partly from a memory’s strength or activation and partly from some other time-related clue to the age of the memory.     

Mnemonic elaboration and recency judgments in children

Recency judgments in second and fourth grade Ss were examined when contextual or spatial locations were correlated with sequential order. No age differences were apparent when the cues were not available; however, unlike fourth grade Ss, the younger Ss failed to take advantage of the additional cues when they were provided. In Experiment 2, second grade Ss were successfully trained to use the appropriate strategy, suggesting that the age related deficiency was one of production rather than mediation. The effectiveness of mnemonic elaboration as an aid to recall of order information was established, together with the short-term efficiency of training such mnemonic strategies in young children who do not adopt them spontaneously. The data support the hypothesis that memory tasks are developmentally sensitive when a deliberate mnemonic strategy can be applied but insensitive to developmental differences when no strategy is appropriate.     

The effects of recency and story content on children's moral judgments

Sixteen stories were read to children at ages 4, 7, and 11 years and to college freshmen (n = 24 per age level) to investigate the effects of recency and specific story content on the development of moral reasoning. The stories consisted of either positive or negative intention and either positive or negative consequence in one of four situations: rule breaking, property damage, property damage with peer interaction, or injury to a person. At each age level, half of the subjects heard the stories with the intention first and the consequence second, and half heard them in the reverse order. Analyses confirmed that in general younger children judged on consequence, whereas older children utilized intention, and that on stories containing intentional injury to a person, the younger child took intention into account. Recency effects were evidenced for both the 4- and 7-year-olds. In the 4-year-old group, however, the recency effects failed to override the salience of negative consequence in contexts of positive intention and negative consequence. This suggests that preschool children may respond primarily to the negative aspect of the story, whether intention or consequence.     

Similarity, global matching, and judgments of frequency

In the test-pair similarity effect, forced-choice recognition is more accurate for similar test pairs, such as leopard-cheetah, than it is for unrelated test pairs, such as leopard-turnip. According to global matching models, this occurs because the retrieved familiarities of similar items are correlated. In the Minerva 2 model, global matching underlies frequency judgments as well as recognition memory. One implication of this model is that judged frequencies of similar items should be correlated. Another implication is that judgments of summed frequency for pairs of words (how many presentations were there of word1 and word2 combined?) should have higher variance when word1 and word2 are similar than when they are unrelated. These predictions were tested and confirmed in two experiments. A review of these and other results suggests that theories of recognition memory should also be applicable to frequency-judgment tasks.     

Aging and conditional probability judgments: a global matching approach

Age differences in bias in conditional probability judgments were investigated based on predictions derived from the Minerva-Decision Making model (M. R. P. Dougherty, C. F. Gettys, & E. E. Ogden, 1999), a global matching model of likelihood judgment. In this study, 248 younger and older adults completed frequency judgment and conditional probability judgment tasks. Age differences in the frequency judgment task are interpreted as an age-related deficit in memory encoding. Older adults' stronger biases in the probability judgment task point to age differences in criterion setting. Age-related biases were eliminated when age groups were equated on memory encoding by means of study time manipulation. The authors conclude that older adults' stronger judgment biases are a function of memory impairment.     

On the importance of looking back: The role of recursive remindings in recency judgments and cued recall

Suppose that you were asked which of two movies you had most recently seen. The results of the experiments reported here suggest that your answer would be more accurate if, when viewing the later movie, you were reminded of the earlier one. In the present experiments, we investigated the role of remindings in recency judgments and cued-recall performance. We did this by presenting a list composed of two instances from each of several different categories and later asking participants to select (Exp. 1) or to recall (Exp. 2) the more recently presented instance. Reminding was manipulated by varying instructions to look back over memory of earlier instances during the presentation of later instances. As compared to a control condition, cued-recall performance revealed facilitation effects when remindings occurred and were later recollected, but interference effects in their absence. The effects of reminding on recency judgments paralleled those on cued recall of more recently presented instances. We interpret these results as showing that reminding produces a recursive representation that embeds memory for an earlier-presented category instance into that of a later-presented one and, thereby, preserves their temporal order. Large individual differences in the probabilities of remindings and of their later recollection were observed. The widespread importance of recursive reminding for theory and for applied purposes is discussed.     

Context effects on tempo and pleasantness judgments for Beatles songs

Context effects on tempo and pleasantness judgments of different tempos were demonstrated in three experiments using Beatles songs. In Experiments 1 and 2, we explored how listening to versions of the same song that were played at different tempos affected tempo and pleasantness ratings. In both experiments, contrast effects were found on judgments of tempo, with target tempos rated faster when context tempos were slow than when they were fast. In both experiments, we also showed that the peak of the pleasantness rating function shifted toward the values of the context tempos, reflecting disordinal context effects on pleasantness relationships. Familiarity with the songs did not moderate these effects, and shifts in tempo ratings did not correlate with shifts in most pleasant target tempos when context was manipulated within subjects. In Experiment 3, we examined how manipulations of context tempos for one song affected judgments of the same song as compared with judgments of other more or less similar songs. For tempo ratings, contrast effects transferred to ratings of a similar song, but for pleasantness ratings, assimilative shifts of ideals were found only for the same song and not for similar songs. This pattern of results was supportive of independent bases for the two context effects.     

Age dissociates recency and lag recency effects in free recall

The temporal relations among word-list items exert a powerful influence on episodic memory retrieval. Two experiments were conducted with younger and older adults in which the age-related recall deficit was examined by using a decomposition method to the serial position curve, partitioning performance into (a) the probability of first recall, illustrating the recency effect, and (b) the conditional response probability, illustrating the lag recency effect (M. W. Howard & M. J. Kahana, 1999). Although the older adults initiated recall in the same manner in both immediate and delayed free recall, temporal proximity of study items (contiguity) exerted a much weaker influence on recall transitions in older adults. This finding suggests that an associative deficit may be an important contributor to older adults' well-known impairment in free recall.     

The evolving sense of agency: Context recency and quality modulate the interaction between prospective and retrospective processes

Humans acquire a sense of agency through their interactions with the world and their sensory consequences. Previous studies have highlighted stable agency-related phenomena like intentional binding, which depend on both prospective, context-dependent and retrospective, outcome-dependent processes. In the current study, we investigated the interaction between prospective and retrospective processes underlying the adaptation of an ongoing sense of agency. The results showed that prospective intentional binding developed during a temporal window of up to 20 prior events was independent of the nature of the ongoing event. By contrast, the characteristics of the ongoing event retrospectively influenced prospective intentional binding developed during a temporal window narrower than 6 prior events. These findings characterize the interaction between prospective and retrospective mechanisms as a fundamental process to continuously update the sense of agency through sensorimotor learning. High psychosis-like experience traits weakened this interaction, suggesting that reduced adaption to the context contributes to altered self-experience.     

Negative recency and event-dependence

In a two-choice situation with event-probabilities of 0.67 and 0.33, recency effects were studied as a function of (a) event-dependence and (b) fore-knowledge of event-probabilities. The following conclusions are drawn: (1) Belief in some kind of event-dependence is a necessary condition for the occurrence of negative recency; (2) Foreknowledge of the event-probabilities does not affect recency phenomena; (3) The behaviour of subjects in the two-choice situation, is less irrational than some writers have claimed.     

Eliminating recency with self‐review: the case of auditors' ‘going concern’ judgments

This paper examines the use of self‐review to debias recency. Recency is found in the ‘going concern’ judgments of staff auditors, but is successfully eliminated by the auditor's use of a simple self‐review technique that would be extremely easy to implement in audit practice. Auditors who self‐review are also less inclined to make audit report choices that are inconsistent with their going concern judgments. These results are important because the judgments of staff auditors often determine the type and extent of documentation in audit workpapers and serve as preliminary inputs for senior auditors' judgments and choices. If staff auditors' judgments are affected by recency, the impact of this bias may be impounded in the ultimate judgments and choices of senior auditors. Since biased judgments can expose auditors to significant costs involving extended audit procedures, legal liability and diminished reputation, simple debiasing techniques that reduce this exposure are valuable. The paper also explores some future research needs and other important issues concerning judgment debiasing in applied professional settings. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Metacognition and learning about primacy and recency effects in free recall: The utilization of intrinsic and extrinsic cues when making judgments of learning

Although memory researchers know about primacy and recency effects, it is unclear whether students are aware of these effects and incorporate them when making judgments of learning (JOLs). The present research examined how participants use serial position information (extrinsic cues) when making JOLs after studying each item and showed that participants rely on the intrinsic qualities of the items and underestimate primacy and recency effects. However, when participants made JOLs prior to studying each item and engaged in multiple study-test sessions, their JOLs accurately reflected recall, as well as when serial position information was explicitly provided during the study phase. The findings are interpreted in a cue utilization framework and suggest that under certain conditions, participants can predict primacy and recency effects.     

Associative processes in immediate recency

Some theorists have argued that the immediate recency effect observed in free recall reflects the emptying out of the contents of a short-term memory buffer (Davelaar, Goshen-Gottstein, Ashkenazi, Haarmann, & Usher, 2005). Others have argued that immediate recency reflects the properties of temporal context used to cue free recall (Howard & Kahana, 2002). We examined immediate free recall of lists with an item from the middle of the list repeated at or near the end. If associative processes contribute to immediate recency, as predicted by the temporal context account, the neighbors of the initial presentation of the repeated item should show enhanced recall at the initial stages of immediate recall. Recall transitions early in output--and even the initiation of recall itself-showed evidence for temporally defined associations that resemble those observed in recall from long-term memory. These results have strong implications for models of the immediate recency effect in free recall.     

Aging and contextual binding: Modeling recency and lag recency effects with the temporal context model

Normal aging has been shown to spare recency effects in the initiation of free recall while disrupting temporally defined associations. The temporal context model (TCM) explains recency and temporally defined associations as consequences of a gradually changing context signal and recovery of those contextual states, respectively. Here we extend TCM to account for the dissociation between recency and temporally defined associations in younger and older adults. Modeling results suggested that the effect of aging was restricted to a decrement in the ability of items to recover the temporal contexts in which they were presented, a function that has been hypothesized to depend on the hippocampus.     

Primacy and recency in nonword repetition

An increasing body of evidence suggests that nonword repetition is related to immediate serial memory (e.g., Baddeley, Gathercole, & Papagno, 1998; Gathercole & Baddeley, 1993). One possible account of this relationship is that a nonword is processed like a list when it is first encountered. If this is the case, it should be possible to detect serial position effects in repetition of single nonwords. Three experiments tested this prediction. Experiment 1 examined whether there would be syllable serial position primacy and recency effects in repetition of polysyllabic nonwords, and obtained both primacy and recency effects. Experiments 2 and 3 showed that these effects were not due to the controlled duration of the nonwords or the requirements of concurrent articulation or the procedure by which nonwords were created.     

Primacy and recency in nonword repetition

An increasing body of evidence suggests that nonword repetition is related to immediate serial memory (e.g., ; ). One possible account of this relationship is that a nonword is processed like a list when it is first encountered. If this is the case, it should be possible to detect serial position effects in repetition of single nonwords. Three experiments tested this prediction. Experiment 1 examined whether there would be syllable serial position primacy and recency effects in repetition of polysyllabic nonwords, and obtained both primacy and recency effects. Experiments 2 and 3 showed that these effects were not due to the controlled duration of the nonwords or the requirements of concurrent articulation or the procedure by which nonwords were created.     

Visual distinctivenesscan enhance recency effects

Experimental efforts to meliorate the modality effect have included attempts to make the visual stimulus more distinctive. McDowd and Madigan (1991) failed to find an enhanced recency effect in serial recall when the last item was made more distinct in terms of its color. In an attempt to extend this finding, three experiments were conducted in which visual distinctiveness was manipulated in a different manner, by combining the dimensions of physical size and coloration (i.e., whether the stimuli were solid or outlined in relief). Contrary to previous findings, recency was enhanced when the size and coloration of the last item differed from the other items in the list, regardless of whether the “distinctive” item was larger or smaller than the remaining items. The findings are considered in light of other research that has failed to obtain a similar enhanced recency effect, and their implications for current theories of the modality effect are discussed.