Presenter: Cara Barbierri
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Tom Cunningham
x7211, cbarb@stlawu.edu

Oral Presentation

This study examined the role of item distinctiveness in the short-term recall of order information.  Experimental trials involved recalling, in correct temporal order, the visually presented lists of letters over different retention intervals.  An item was made distinctive during stimulus presentation by its absence, that is, by deleting it from a known list of letters and substituting a red dash in its place.  There were both missing letter (distinctive) trials and no missing letter (non-distinctive) trials.  Twenty-four participants were randomly assigned to three different encoding conditions that varied the opportunity for encoding the distinctive/missing item.  In the standard condition, participants were signaled at the beginning of a trial that a missing letter would occur.  In the identify condition, participants were not permitted to say the letter during stimulus presentation when the red dash occurred.  In the generate condition, participants saw the missing letter prior to the trial and were required to say the missing letter during stimulus when a red dash occurred.  We analyzed the effects of the independent variables using two dependent measures, output order and proportion of correct trials.  Our major findings included (a) participants in the generate condition responded more frequently in a normal output order than participants in other encoding conditions, and (b) the relationship between length of retention interval and recall of missing letter and no missing letter trials varied as a function of encoding condition.