The present study supports earlier reports showing poorer free recall for the item preceding a unique item in an otherwise homogeneous list. Subjects were shown lists of common nouns and instructed either prior to or immediately following list presentation to be aware of a word in the list from a particular taxonomic category. Recall of the unique item was improved both by priority and “posteriority” instructions, whereas recall was depressed for the immediately preceding item in both conditions. It was concluded that encoding failures are sufficient but not necessary to produce induced retrograde amnesia.
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