First Recall Costs and Benefits

We re-evaluate the serial position effect of free recall (Murdock, 1962), completing a multi-session, between-subjects immediate free recall experiment with conditions that modulate list length and presentation rate. We partition participants into groups: those who tend to initiate recall with items from the start of the list, those who begin recall with end-of-list items, and those without a consistent recall initiation tendency. Our analyses show that while recall initiation tendency does not reliably predict the number of successful recalls, it plays profoundly on the ways in which participants achieve the same overall performance. We evaluate response times, intrusion rates, and the temporal and semantic organization of memory to understand how recall initiation tendency imparts different costs and benefits to the success of recall initiation itself and subsequent memory dynamics.