Number of Items presented and recalled as Determinants of Short-term Recall

Abstract

THE percentage of items correctly recalled from a, sequence of items decreases as the number of items in the sequence increases^1,2. Two factors normally vary directly with increasing sequence length: number of items presented and number of items to be recalled. When a twelve-item sequence was presented, Anderson³ found that increasing the number of items to be recalled from four to eight to twelve increased the rate of error. Further investigation is necessary to determine if this is true substantially above the memory span. The importance of the number of items presented, independent of the number of items to be recalled, has never been adequately investigated. The following experiments on short-term recall of sequences beyond the memory span were designed to determine the independent effects of both these factors.