Serial Learning of Heterogeneous Items in Ordered and Unordered Sequences

The present study tests the acquisition-strategy hypothesis of serial learning, which attributes the serial-position effect to consistent orders of item acquisition among individual Ss, and over-all learning difficulty in part to the ease of establishing an order of acquisition. As predicted, lists of CVC trigrams which were organized in terms of associative values to facilitate a temporal beginning-to-end strategy of acquisition were learned faster than unorganized lists or lists organized from end to beginning. Also as predicted, an unorganized array of heterogeneous trigrams produced more errors and less regularity of the serial-position curves than a homogeneous series. Results thus supported the strategy hypothesis of serial learning.