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 seria..