The retention of incidentally acquired order information

Abstract

After subjects studied word pairs, they were asked to recall the ordinal position of each pair in the list, both immediately after study and 10 min, 48 h, or 1 week later. On the immediate test, they could remember the positions of some of the pairs at the beginning and end of the list, but memory for pairs in the interior of the list was poor. Position information was lost over time. There was no evidence that associative recall depended on the availability of position information, or that the forgetting of item information depended upon the loss of position information.