Abstract

Two experiments (n=24 in each) compared short-term recognition memory for hard-to-name gustatory (wines) and non-verbal visual (abstract matrices) stimuli. Participants were presented with a list of three items followed by a single yes/no recognition judgment. Performance levels across the two stimulus-types did not differ. However, stimulus type and serial position interacted revealing primacy and recency for the gustatory stimuli and recency only for non-verbal visual stimuli. The first item advantage for the gustatory stimulus is consistent with the preferential primacy bias reported for wines (Mantonakis et al., 2009). However, the cross-modal incongruence in serial position function contradicts the proposition that serial position functions are task, rather than stimulus, dependent (Ward et al., 2005). Indeed, the findings contribute further to past evidence of stimulus-dependency in determining the serial position function (Johnson and Miles, 2009). Such findings could support modularity in the functioning of short-term memory.