How frequency affects recency judgments: a model for recency discrimination.

Previous evidence that repetition of an item in a list enhances that item's recency relative to other items has been interpreted as favoring a memory strength theory of recency discrimination. However, serious doubt has been cast upon the validity of the strength theory by experiments such as that of Hintzman and Block, which instead favor a multitrace representation for repetitions of an item. The present experiments test two plausible interpretations of the effect of frequency on relative recency judgments. The first, that low frequencies result in poor recognition memory, hence poorer recency discrimination, is discounted in Experiment I, which still found sizeable frequency effects on relative recency judgments even when considering only recognized items. A multiple-trace theory of contextual time tagging was then proposed to account for the effects of event frequency on subjective recency. Experiment II, which collected event frequency as well as relative recency judgments, yielded data which were fit quantitatively by the multiple-trace time tagging theory. It was found, too, that relative "distance" judgments were not psychologically symmetric to relative recency judgments—a result not predicted by the time tagging model.