Serial position phenomena: Memory for acts, contents and spatial position patterns

The influence of functional control operations on serial position effects was examined in a series of four experiments. When recall was required of performed operations as well as of the information operated upon, the result generally turned out to be absence of recency effects and presence of primacy effects. Primacy effects were found to be more prominent with active execution of operations than with passive list reception. Simultaneous presence of spatial and temporal position cues was shown to coincide with disruption of the ordinary primacy-recency pattern. The findings were taken to prove the importance of functional factors, and were interpreted as in agreement with a two-stage analysis of serial learning where the first stage is assumed to involve the differentiation of list items and the second stage the integration of differentiated items. The experiments were claimed to indicate that memory is better understood from a problem-solving than from an information-processing point of view.