SPATIALLY DISTRIBUTED STIMULI SHOW LITTLE EFFECT OF RECENCY WITH EITHER VISUAL OR AUDITORY PRESENTATION

The effect of recency-the superior recall of final as opposed to middl e items in serial presentation-is usually greater for auditorily as op posed to visually presented stimuli. However, the standard method of p resenting both visual and auditory stimuli consists of temporal presen tation in a single location. Having used a new procedure, in which sti muli were spatially distributed, Battacchi, Pelamatti, and Umilta (199 0) reported a robust effect of visual recency in immediate serial reca ll, similar to that found with auditory stimuli. Their subjects were n ative speakers of Italian. To test and explain these findings, we perf ormed three experiments with native speakers of English as subjects. T he stimuli were letters of the alphabet and vowel-consonant syllables; presentations were both auditory and visual. The results suggest that the spatial distribution of stimuli does not produce a major recency effect in the visual modality and leads to a smaller recency effect wi th auditory stimuli than that usually found in the standard presentati on condition. Finally, in Experiment 3, the use of native speakers of Italian as subjects demonstrated that the difference in the subjects' language is not a factor in the discrepancy between our findings and t hose of Battacchi et al.