A total of 300 university students were presented a brief list of non-alphanumeric items and instructed to recall immediately either the items (free recall, FR), the order in which the items were presented (order recall, OR), or both (serial recall, SR). Presentation rate and retention interval were additional experimental variables in Exp. I and II, respectively. In both experiments significant differences in recall were found between FR conditions and the remaining two, which did not differ from each other. More items were recalled at the slow than fas: rate. Retention interval was not a significant variable. Results suggest that retention will improve when order information is eliminated from recall (Brown, 1958), that the recall of item and order information involve at least partially independent memory processes, and that, while the recall of items may proceed independently of the recall of their order, the converse is not true.
Order information in short-term memory and time estimation
