The fill-in effect in serial recall can be obscured by omission errors.

Abstract

Henson (1996) provided a number of demonstrations of error patterns in serial recall that contradict chaining models. Chaining models predict that when participants erroneously recall an item too early, recall should proceed from the point of error. In contradiction to such a prediction, Henson found evidence for a fill-in effect: participants were much more likely to revisit an erroneously skipped item than to continue onward to later list items. However, recent reanalyses of serial recall data sets have found evidence for the opposite pattern in serial recall experiments that use open sets of items. We tested the hypothesis that open sets of items produce fill-in effects by comparing serial recall with an open set and a closed set, and when participants were allowed and prohibited from skipping over responses, and comparing serial recall with a reconstruction of order task. Fill-in effects were observed in all cases except when participants were not encouraged to skip over responses. Subsequent analyses indicated that when omission rates were equated, a fill-in effect was observed for all conditions when lists contained no omissions. These results suggest that high omission rates in open-set designs obscure a fill-in effect and further sound a cautionary note about interpreting cases in which recall continues in the forward direction after a skipped response.