Short- and long-term recency in the temporal context model: Comment

Countering claims that recency effects observed at different time scales arise from a common forgetting process, Davelaar et al. (2005) presented a number of experimental dissociations between shortand long-term recency. They used these dissociations to argue that separate mechanisms underlie shortand long-term recency. Here we show that the temporal context model (TCM), which assumes that both shortand long-term recency arise from the same contextual drift process, can account for the major recency dissociations at different time scales. Our version of TCM, which includes the Usher and McClelland (2001) leaky-accumulator model as a retrieval rule, captures the dynamics of immediate, delayed, and continual distractor free recall, and shows that dissociations between shortand long-term recency naturally arise from a model that uses an internal contextual state as the sole cue for retrieval across time scales.