Repetition between and within modalities in free recall

Abstract

A repetition experiment was designed to test the effects of lag and modality changes on free recall. The results showed a powerful lag effect over the range of 0-9 items, however, there were no differences in recall between items repeated in the same or different modality in the 56-item list. Either the encoding variability hypothesis is wrong or it applies only to variation in semantic attributes, not to variation in physical attributes such as modality. © 1974, The Psychonomic Society, Inc.. All rights reserved.