Journal article
Using response time distributions and race models to characterize primacy and recency effects in free recall initiation
AF Osth, S Farrell
Psychological Review | AMER PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOC | Published : 2019
DOI: 10.1037/rev0000149
Abstract
Primacy and recency effects are common benchmarks for models of free recall and episodic memory. In this work, we show that RT distributions carry diagnostic information about how items enter into competition for recall, and how that competition impacts on the dynamics of recall and leads to novel conclusions about the forms of primacy and recency effects. We jointly fit RT distributions and serial position functions for free recall initiation with both a racing diffusion model and the linear ballistic accumulator (LBA: Brown & Heathcote, 2008). The models were fit in a hierarchical Bayesian framework, factorially varying different assumptions of how primacy and recency are generated. Recenc..
View full abstractGrants
Awarded by Australian Research Council
Funding Acknowledgements
We give special thanks to Mike Kahana and colleagues for generously sharing these datasets and Karl Healey for assistance with extracting response times from the PEERS datasets. We also thank Mike Kahana and Geoff Ward for their very helpful comments on a previous version of this article. Portions of this work were presented at the 2017 Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, the 2018 Australian Mathematical Psychology conference, the 2018 Context and Episodic Memory Symposium, and the 2018 Annual Meeting of the Society for Mathematical Psychology, and a preprint of this work was shared on the Open Science Foundation (OSF) website. This work was supported by ARC Discovery Early Career award (DE170100106) awarded to Adam F. Osth, and an ARC Future Fellowship (FT130100149) awarded to Simon Farrell. Model code can be found at https://osf.io/bkjqn/.