Perceiving and encoding two kinds of item-information

Perception and encoding of item-information about the occurrence of simple, well-known events (numbers) for retrieval by either same-order recall or serial-order recall was investigated by specifying kind of recall to be used either before or after perception and encoding. Both same-order and serial-order recall were less when kind of recall was specified after presentation, but serial-order recall decreased more than same-order recall. These results indicate that the same numbers may be perceived differently for same-order or serial-order recall: different kinds of item-information may be encoded either in terms of presentation characteristics (serial position for same-order recall) or event characteristics (ordinal position for serial-order recall).