Contiguity Effect Is Asymmetric Across Pairs, How About Within?

In the memory literature, paired associates and list recall have been studied separately. Recall probabilities of forward and backward recalls have been found approximately equal in paired associates. Whereas in free recall, subjects tend to successively recall words studied in nearby positions, denoted as the contiguity effect, favoring the following word over the preceding one. Temporal Context Model (TCM) proposes that items studied in nearby positions have similar study contexts and recalling an item activates its context along with its neighbors’ which results in the contiguity effect and forward asymmetry. Kılıç et. al. (2013) developed a probed recall task to test the contiguity effect by interrupting the linearity of the experimental procedure. In the current study, we employed their probed recall task on the paired associates where participants studied multiple lists of pairs. At test, they were given a pair to recognize and required to go back to the list that the member was presented in and recall another word from the list. Conditional response probability (CRP) curves indicated both within and between list contiguity with the forward asymmetry, however a symmetric retrieval was observed in paired associates. These two patterns of recall data from the probed recall task are in line with the previous findings in the literature of paired associates and list recall patterns which fits the contextual coding mechanism of TCM.